AMC has just announced that it will be offering an alternative to the popular MoviePass subscription service. For $19.95 a month, the “AMC Stubs A-List” buys you three AMC movie tickets per week, which can include any and all formats (3D, IMAX, Dolby Cinema, etc.) and can be used on repeat viewings of the same film.
There’s no rollover (you can’t see 12 movies on the last two days of the month), but you can use all three weekly tickets on the same day, albeit with a two-hour buffer between each showtime. Unlike MoviePass, which makes you drive to the theater and be within 100 yards of the location before finalizing the ticket sale, AMC will allow you to “buy” advance tickets on the smartphone app.
Another gimmick is that it will include all of the benefits already offered by the $15 per year AMC Stubs Premiere program. The service provides free upgrades on concessions (“Dammit, Scott, if you eat that whole medium popcorn, you’ll have a stomachache for the next 24 hours!”), with no online ticketing fees and more points for money spent at AMC, which then add up to cash discounts on goods and services. The conventional AMC Stubs program is free but doesn’t include the free upgrades or the waived online ticket fees (unless it’s more than three tickets).
The big thing about today’s news is two-fold. First, at some point, someone is going to have to offer a family-sized monthly subscription plan. Cinemark has an $8.99 per month plan that includes a single 2D ticket but also includes rollover from month to month. MoviePass is still doing its thing. Say what you will about how it does or doesn’t make money or its occasional errors or tech issues, but this year-long subscriber has been pretty happy with the service. I don’t expect perfection in a service that offers such a value, but my satisfaction rate is at maybe 90%, even if I’m not a fan of its “take a picture of your ticket” feature.
Nonetheless, no matter how this all plays out, MoviePass has unquestionably changed the game. Consumers have become aware of, if not outright used to, the idea of theatrical moviegoing as a monthly service as opposed to a pay-per-view item. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Regal roll out a rival version, and it, too, has a viewer loyalty program (the Regal Crown Club) that can be merged with any monthly “X tickets per month” service.
Yes, the theater chains are gunning for MoviePass. But even if it eventually crumbles, MoviePass, which still offers one 2D movie ticket per day for $9.95, may have been a game changer.
It’s not like the theaters at large are going to cancel their monthly subscription plans once MoviePass folds or fades away. And once you get consumers into the idea that theatrical moviegoing should be a monthly flat-fee service as opposed to pay-as-you-go, well, then there are all kinds of challenging questions about who gets what money when a ticket is sold. It’s one thing when a third-party just outright subsidizes the whole ticket sale. It’s another when it’s the theaters themselves subsidizing a large portion of their ticket sales.
At this juncture, I don’t know how the theoretical money from a given ticket gets allocated in this scenario, aside from presumably treating the ticket as a full-price purchase with half the “money” sent to studios in the hopes that the users will buy concessions. And this isn’t a situation like Netflix or Hulu where one channel has exclusive content that the other does not. If the majority of general moviegoers end up opting for subscription-based services, all of these chains showing (mostly) the same dozen or so movies at a time, what exactly is the barometer for success for any single film?
It’s not even a “tickets sold” situation since you can argue that there is no differential for the theater for a consumer punching a card for Universal/Comcast Corp.’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom as opposed to Walt Disney’s Avengers: Infinity War or Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc.’s Ocean’s 8 since the ticket isn’t being “purchased” (or it is being purchased at $0.33 to $19.99 per ticket, depending on what plan you use and how frequently you use it).
The various theater chains might have been better off just letting MoviePass run its course (it may not be long for this world) and letting it just be a thing that happened for a year. Now that the theaters have responded with their own versions, it is almost certain that this form of theatrical moviegoing will become normalized by the very demographics that would otherwise buy a handful of regular price tickets in a given month. I’m not sure how that turns out, but it sure feels like at least the potential for a seismic change in how consumers view theatrical moviegoing.
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