 As an entertainment editor at The Verge, I spend a lot of time at the movies. But most people say the opposite. Last year in the US and Canada, theater attendance dropped to a 25-year low. And I get it. These days, movie theaters are competing with Netflix and Hulu, 4K flat screens and video games. And as attendance goes down, ticket prices have gone up, making the whole thing more difficult to justify in the first place. But lately, some friends and colleagues have been trying to see more movies with something called MoviePass. MoviePass If you somehow haven't heard of it, the pitch for MoviePass was simple. Spend $10 a month and you can see up to one movie a day. For a lot of people, that seemed too good to be true. And by June of 2018, over 3 million people had signed up for the service. It seems like everybody should win, but in reality, everybody's losing. MoviePass, its customers, and theaters. But by popularizing subscription services, MoviePass may have shown theaters the way to control their own destiny. MoviePass caught on because it seemed too good to be true. And sure enough, it was. This year alone, the service has bait and switched on surge pricing, repeat viewings, and theater availability. And that's just for starters. In the meantime, theaters are frustrated because a service like MoviePass prevents them from competing on things like premium screens and better seating. Imagine being a Netflix subscriber, only to find out on the day that Stranger Things comes out that you have to pay three extra bucks to watch it. And you can only see it once. That's the kind of step that MoviePass customers have had to deal with. And that's after the company decided to get rid of its movie a day plan before deciding to bring it back again. I mean, look, the whole thing really is a mess, and it comes down to the fact that MoviePass doesn't make money. The company hopes that when it hits a certain subscriber base size, all the math will magically work out. But in the meantime, it's burning through cash, causing the stock price of its parent company to plummet. The fix apparently seems to be to get its customers to just stop going to movies. Or if they do, to pay up. MoviePass customers taking the hit starts to become a pretty common theme. What happens when they couldn't get AMC theaters to the negotiating table? Suddenly its subscribers couldn't access 10 of AMC's busiest locations. And what about when it was advertising a movie that was opening opposite Jennifer Lawrence's new film? Suddenly its customers couldn't access Jennifer Lawrence's movie either. That's not to say it's all terrible. For some people, MoviePass really is a great value, and that's fantastic. And according to the company, its customers do spend more on popcorn and concessions, which is great for theater owners. But it's essentially middleman trying to build its own business on top of what theaters have already done, whether they want it to or not. Doug White, executive director of the Hollywood Theater in Portland, Oregon, had some particularly frank thoughts on the subject. They suddenly inserted themselves into our business model, sold them the same tickets at cheaper. MoviePass says, you know, we basically stole your customers, and now to get them back, we want to cut. It's just a weird business model, and not something that we're finding terribly friendly, you know? I mean, we've created something that we don't feel like we're dependent on MoviePass, right? Like we've created our own community, our own perks, our own benefits that MoviePass can't replicate. See, the problem with something like MoviePass is that it prevents theater chains from competing for your business. Major chains usually show all the same movies. They compete on things like location, pricing, and quality of presentation. Laser projection, HDR, sophisticated surround sound, 70 millimeter. These are all ways that theaters can compete for your business and lure you away from your 4K living room TV. But MoviePass ignores that premium experience, and the sizable investment theaters made to get it, by offering just the entry-level 2D experience. It dumps theaters down, turning a night at the movies into a commodity experience, where the only thing worrying about is the price. That's great if you don't want to spend $15 to see Deadpool 2, but it's dangerously short-sighted, because when you convince customers that movies aren't worth paying for, and that presentation doesn't matter, you're unintentionally removing every reason for them to leave the house at all. There's no denying that MoviePass has changed the dynamics. So the question becomes, how do theater chains react? AMC, which has had no qualms about talking smack about MoviePass in the past, recently launched its own subscription service called A-List. That service costs $20 a month, and you can see three movies a week, but with no restrictions, meaning you can go to AMC Prime with Dolby Vision, or IMAX, or anything else the theater has to offer. Given that's the biggest chain in the world, for a lot of people that's going to be pretty compelling. We're used to thinking that disruption is the answer to everything, and that cheaper automatically equals better, but that's not always the case. Going to the movies is an experience, and the more that theaters can control their own destiny, and react to the wants and needs of their customers, the better kinds of experiences they'll be able to provide. Now, what they can control is the quality and variety of the movies arriving in their theaters, but that... well, that's going to be an entirely different video. Mamma Mia, guys, huh? Huh? I know, here's what we're doing. This is how we're starting, guys. Right here. This is it. Okay, starting again. If I haven't slated, that's the slate.