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The Messy Rebirth of MoviePass

The original pennies-for-dollars, money-incinerating subscription phenomenon was literally too good to be true. But the inevitable failure of MoviePass also opened the door to a genuinely transformative idea: moviegoing as a service. All it needed was a better business model.

Stacy Spikes
Photo: J. Countess/Getty Images
Matthew Belloni
August 26, 2022

“It’s not been a fun morning,” Stacy Spikes told me today from New York, where he’s been prepping the new and (hopefully!) improved MoviePass. The waitlist for the subscription ticket service relaunch received 30,000 sign-ups in its first five minutes, causing a crash that lasted two and a half hours. Not ideal for a company that became a punchline after signing up millions of movie fans in 2017 and 2018—and then swiftly going bankrupt. “But you know what, that just shows people are really interested,” continued Spikes, the company’s co-founder and recently returned C.E.O.