Being a former movie theater manager for over a decade, to say it was a trial by fire would be putting things mildly. Over the course of my many years working for both AMC and Regal, I was faced with all manner of ridiculous issues. This included people who would fall asleep watching a movie and demand refunds, disruptive kids doing a drive-by pumpkin throwing at an unsuspecting man in an auditorium, and being cursed out and called racist over a sold out showing. One of the times that sticks out the most in my memory was that rocky period when MoviePass began to take over as a primary payment method for quite a chunk of our moviegoers. Person after person would present their shiny red MoviePass Mastercards, preloaded with funds, and there were often more issues with this simple process than one could possibly imagine. I would have had a MoviePass myself had I not already been privy to an endless supply of free tickets; who could truly pass up an idea as enticing as $9.95 for monthly unlimited screenings? MoviePass, MovieCrash transported me straight back to that summer of 2018, complete with issues so constant it was hard to believe it even existed in the first place. More informative peak behind the curtain than a deep dive on the topic of movie theater subscription services, MoviePass, MovieCrash is a decent-enough, surface level documentary that manages to put the inherent weirdness of its mission statement into a tidy late-2010s time capsule.
The documentary explores the humble beginnings of MoviePass and its duo of black creators, but the way the structure unfolds, we see the two white men in power that drove it into the ground before we dive into either of the forefathers. CEO Mitch Lowe, also the CEO of RedBox and alleged co-founder of Netflix, claims responsibility for the beast that MoviePass would become. He reminisces fondly about his earliest movie memory, seeing Psycho at a Drive-In theater with his family. With Mitch’s guidance, the company would take on its other biggest partner in company HMNY, complete with their fearless leader, Ted Farnsworth. Under Ted and Mitch, MoviePass introduced a catchy promotional price of $9.95 per month for unlimited movies. How quickly this went viral surprised nearly everyone involved. Within 48 hours, the company was completely inundated. With just seven people working in their customer service department, it was virtually impossible to keep up with the demand.
Before all of the mania, Stacy Spikes simply wanted to carve out a space for more people of color to have opportunities showing off the films they made. He spearheaded the Urbanworld Film Festival—out of that concept, Stacy wanted to create a subscription service. Stacy’s trajectory is fascinating, from being in a Rush cover band to a vice president of marketing over at Miramax Films. He found a partner and fellow creative in Hamet Watt, who vowed to help raise the money to make Stacy’s subscription dreams happen in just a month. Their collaboration conceived MoviePass as the largest moviegoing subscription service in existence. A brief collaboration with now-defunct movietickets.com ended abruptly when AMC Theatres hit them with a cease and desist. Still, they had the patent locked in with using location services to unlock access to tickets. Desperate to make a partnership with the theater companies to sustain their model, Stacy and Hamet claimed that they needed a white man with white hair to get other like-minded parties interest, so then along came Mitch to the rescue.
In exploring the juxtaposing trajectories of two different duos of people involved in MoviePass, MoviePass, MovieCrash makes an argument for who really helped make it into a full-blown phenomenon. Without Stacy and Hamet, the brand would not exist, nor would their concept of a moviegoing subscription service as the theater equivalent to Netflix. Then again, without Mitch and Ted, it would never rise to the prominence of having more than three million active subscribers at the peak of its popularity. Ted’s terrible decision-making and reliance on spending money just as quickly as they raked it in would ultimately lead to the downfall. Lavish parties were thrown, balloon dreams of becoming an actual moviemaking company somehow spiraled into disastrous reality, and the hate mail at the constant issues with the servers and purchases eventually led to literal shit being sent in to the office. It is all an exercise in what not to do in big business. The money was not being funneled back into the right channels, and the model itself could not sustain the enormous weight of people taking advantage of the system. One of the interviewed people here that was a regular MoviePass user says he went to the movies 428 times. These are not circumstances that could have been predicted, but people will always end up taking full advantage of a great thing when they have it.
A lot of this is interesting, but a large portion of this documentary doesn’t tell viewers who followed the news as it came out much of anything they did not already know. In my eyes, the major misstep lies in the failure to explore the impact this system had on movie theaters, eventually leading them to create their own subscription services, including AMC A-List and Regal Unlimited. This would not have happened at all without the massive success and then immense failure of MoviePass. The studios and theatre companies saw a real demand for this type of service, then etched out a model that would be more beneficial to them in the long run. MoviePass, MovieCrash also gives nary a single mention to folks that would get their sparkly cards loaded with funds, only to use them on other things, such as groceries or food. The barely hour-and-a-half runtime leaves little in the way of exploratory elements or bold statements. This is just about MoviePass, which is okay, if slightly underwhelming.
In short, corporate greed ruins everything, and people really really want to see movies in the theater with a cheap enough option. The intentions of Stacy and Hamet were genuine, longing to create a moviegoing community that at one time organically had been formed out of their growing subscriber base. Eventually, not only were these intentions pushed out, but Stacy and Hamet themselves were physically removed from the company altogether. As the company hemorrhaged money, the economics became even foggier as Mitch and Ted kept insisting they were going to become cash-flow positive to the media. Shady stock practices and even shadier help towards the growing customer base led to a disastrous ending. A little sidenote of a happy ending involving Stacy makes the failure of MoviePass at large go down just a little bit smoother. Lacking the fully-fleshed subtext beyond mere surface-level information, MoviePass, MovieCrash should entertain casual watchers while leaving insiders a bit cold. While I will never forget the summer of 2018 and the constant frustrations with MoviePass, I will probably forget this film entirely in a few weeks. I definitely don’t need to see it 428 times.
Crash the system when MoviePass, MovieCrash debuts May 29th, exclusively on Max.
