Earlier this year subscription service MoviePass stunned the public when it cut its monthly price significantly from $30 a month to just $9.95. Now, we see just how successful that move was in increasing subscriber numbers. MoviePass had about 20,000 subscribers prior to dropping their price, and that number has jumped to 600,000 since the change. However, even that is just a drop in the bucket compared to what the company now projects to gain over the next few months. The service is now expecting an additional 3.1 million subscribers by August of next year, which is 600,000 more than even they were originally projecting.
A jump from 20,000 to 600,000 subscribers is a fairly impressive leap all by itself, but the idea that another 3 million people could join MoviePass over the next few months is just staggering. The service has more than made up for the drop in revenue that the price drop caused, so the initial goal of increasing MoviePass income is already happening. Of course, the only question now is whether or not such a low price point is sustainable.
MoviePass allows subscribers to see one movie a day, every day, for only the price of the $9.95 monthly subscription. Since MoviePass pays the theater the full ticket price, MoviePass bears the expense if users take full advantage of the subscription and see multiple movies per month. While the previous $30 price point meant that people had to see a few movies per month to make the service worthwhile, the new price means that even seeing a single movie can make MoviePass pay for itself.
MoviePass will certainly lose money on individual subscribers while making money on others. However, what's clear is that MoviePass is less interested in individual subscribers than they are in the collective group of them. MoviePass will use its subscriber base to collect a lot of information about the moviegoing public. By selling this data to interested parties, like those same movie theaters, the company can make money elsewhere. The fact that MoviePass now expects more subscribers than previously, means that data is only getting more valuable, and more useful to those who might want to take advantage.
While movie studios will likely find a lot useful in that data, and theaters may get to sell more popcorn and soda than they did previously, that doesn't mean that everybody is happy with MoviePass. AMC Theaters has made their dissatisfaction with the company well known, though, at this point, it's unclear whether there's much the company can do to stop the use of MoviePass in their theaters, short of not accepting Mastercard in their locations, which would shut out a lot of non-MoviePass users as well.
Of course, with a lot of people being understandably concerned about their data being sold, it's possible that there may also be a hard limit to the number of people interested in subscribing to MoviePass.
