MoviePass, which has gone from the hot new thing to an afterthought for movie goers in the span of less than a year, has picked up additional funding that will keep it alive.
Ted Farnsworth, CEO of MoviePass owner Helios & Matheson Analytics, announced Wednesday that the company has raised another $65 million in funding and hinted it’s actually planning on making acquisitions in the near future.
Farnsworth did not disclose the source of the funding.
“We’re doing M&A, we’re looking at all kinds of acquisitions at any given time and we’ll grow the company that way and I think you’ll see over the next few weeks,” he said at a conference run by TheWrap.
Helios & Matheson’s stock has gone from over $2,400 per share in January to less than four cents in early trading Thursday. Farnsworth, though, ruled out the possibility of bankruptcy.
“Not true. Not true at all,” he said when asked about reports the company was considering such a move. “An AMC or someone might say we’re unsustainable. I look at it a different way. We’ve got no debt. They’ve got billions in debt. It all depends on the lens. … We have never even considered [bankruptcy].”
Helios & Matheson, in July, filed a shelf registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission in order to raise $1.2 billion in additional capital. The company, which was lauded initially for letting subscribers attend as many movies as it wanted for a fixed price each month, lost favor when it reworked its business model, limiting customers to three films per month. That announcement came one week after MoviePass trended on Twitter for suffering an outage that restricted users’ access to some of the summer’s most popular hits, including Mission: Impossible—Fallout.
