MoviePass, the financially troubled company that was first to market with a subscription movie service, was still working in Honolulu yesterday, at least in our sample of one. We were able to use MoviePass at the Kahala Theaters for a morning matinee with no problem.
That wasn’t the case on Saturday when we went with friends to one of Consolidated’s Ward theaters. MoviePass didn’t work, instead returning an error message when we tried to check in at the theater, and we had to buy tickets instead. It’s the first time we’ve directly experienced the company’s meltdown, although given all the news reporting it was no surprise. Similar problems were later reported in other parts of the country.
At this point, I’m sure most MoviePass members are watching the news, which seems to report new financial woes facing the company almost every day. We’ve been watching the news and wondering whether, or for how long, the company will be able to remain in business.
We were all ears when Hawaii News Now ran featured a story on MoviePass on its evening news last night. But to my surprise and disappointment, they used a national story out of New York rather than doing their own reporting on how the company’s woes are affecting local theaters and moviegoers. Both Consolidated and Regal theaters chains are part of the MoviePass program, and it should have been easy to get a local angle on the story. Too bad they took the easy and cheap way out.
We bought two annual MoviePass subscriptions at the beginning of this year when they were being sold by Costco at an additional discount beyond the already low annual MoviePass price. Even at that point, it seemed too good to be true. And it’s been a good deal for us so far, although we’re far from daily movie watchers.
MoviePass allows you to go to one movie per day, but I would guess our experience is typical. We’ve been to 16 MoviePass films since the first week of February, when our cards were received, according to our account history. A couple of times, we did two movies in a week. During other periods, we went weeks without setting foot in a theater. Overall, we’ve certainly gotten our money’s worth, especially given Costco’s additional discount off of the already low MoviePass price.
Our attitude now is that every additional movie we are able to see as part of our MoviePass subscription is a gift that we’ll enjoy. We hope the company is able to stem its losses and carry on in some reasonable form. We’ll see. And who knows, maybe we’ll even see some local reporting.
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Ian, I think your article would have been just as informative without the final sentence of paragraph 4 (“Too bad they [Hawaii News Now] took the cheap and easy way out.” That’s kind of a dig, perhaps intended as such. Maybe HNN didn’t feel the movie ticket topic merited the type of coverage that they would give to, say, the Kilauea eruption. We really don’t know all the factors that went into their decision to use a national source. Disclosure: I don’t go to movies; maybe if I did, I would feel differently.
The same pattern continued the following weekend, when suddenly on Sat. late afternoon, there were no screenings available on MoviePass anywhere! We had to buy tickets to get into Mission Impossible. Anyone know what happened to the service – looked to be more than some tech glitch.