MoviePass couldn’t afford to pay for movie tickets on Thursday
If I am a traditional 'tech' company - I can afford to lose money when I am investing it in my platform or technology. It's like borrowing money to invest in your assets.<p>For MoviePass, they are losing money and passing it off to theaters - it's like borrowing money to buy more ingredients for a failing restaurant. You can't charge less than the marginal cost, it doesn't make sense!<p>I am trying to wrap my head around what MoviePass is trying to do - especially given the number of friends I have who say they would easily be willing to pay 2x or 3x for the service. The data they are gathering cannot be more valuable than the cost of a movie ticket.<p>I have to imagine they were making a play at building up a huge enough audience to strongarm theaters into lowering their rates. Well the joke is on them - everyone knows that they have no bargaining power. Plus, signing up was so hard, their audience is skewed towards power users and people persistent in their cheapness.<p>An emergency loan with no change to the service whatsoever? They are really having a deer in the headlights moment.