MoviePass, a company that has had more twists and turns than a big screen thriller, is returning to its roots. The company plans to re-release its unlimited plan next week, Khalid Itum, executive vice president of MoviePass told Variety. He did not reveal how much the plan will cost.
The move comes as MoviePass faces competition from AMC Stubs A-List. The theater chain allows members to see three movies per week at a price point of around $20, depending on where the subscriber lives.
MoviePass has more than 3 million subscribers, but letting that many people binge on movies doesn’t come cheap. The subscription service began implementing various restrictions last year, including limiting the number of movies a person could see, implementing peak pricing for certain show times and even hiking its price to $14.95 before it reversed the increase.
While the company has been bleeding money, the plan was never to get rich off of subscription fees. The real gold for the company is the data it collects.
“We get an enormous amount of information. Since we mail you the card, we know your home address, of course, we know the makeup of that household, the kids, the age groups, the income,” CEO Mitch Lowe said at the Entertainment Finance Forum last March, according to Seeking Alpha.
“Then because you are being tracked in your GPS by the phone, our patent basically turns on and off our payment system by hooking that card to the device ID on your phone, so we watch how you drive from home to the movies. We watch where you go afterwards, and so we know the movies you watch,” he said. “We know all about you. We don’t sell that data. What we do is we use that data to market film.”
