Around this time last year, MoviePass was still flying high, disrupting the industry and helping millions of subscribers to see more movies than ever before. Then came the Mission: Impossible – Fallout incident, which sparked a series of public and costly stumbles that dragged down the service and saw its parent company’s stock plummet along with it. Now MoviePass is rising like a phoenix from the ashes…okay, well maybe not exactly, but MoviePass stock is up 40%.
Shares of Helios & Matheson Analytics were up over 40% yesterday in over-the-counter trading, rising above a penny and reaching 1.23 cents per share before the close of the day according to Deadline. The day also saw triple the normal volume of the company’s shares changing hands. This comes after Helios & Matheson shares were delisted from the NASDAQ last month due to the foibles of its MoviePass unit, which saw the company’s shares trade under $1 since last July.
So what changed? Well, it all comes down to the new business strategy MoviePass will be employing going forward. Helios & Matheson still plans on spinning off its MoviePass business into its own public traded company, to help distinguish the beleaguered movie service from the data analytics firm and the other parts of its business.
That new company, MoviePass Entertainment Holdings will be made up of three separate pillars, each addressing a different part of the business. MoviePass Films will be the company’s production arm, producing new movies under the MoviePass banner; the MoviePass subscription service and app for which the company gained its name; and the Moviefone brand that Helios & Matheson and MoviePass acquired from Verizon last year.
MoviePass said that this new three-pillar model would generate its own revenue, without reliance on studios and exhibitors. This is in stark contrast to the MoviePass of a year or so ago that entered the room with all the subtlety of the Kool-Aid man and wanted to strike deals with studios to promote movies and get a share of tickets and concessions from theater chains.
The idea is that the three parts of the business will work in concert, sharing each others resources in an ecosystem where each part benefits the others. The MoviePass Films arm will make movies with an eye towards transcending theaters, and get deals for home video releases and international distribution. That should then help the MoviePass theatergoing subscription service to grow. The Moviefone digital platform will then be used as a promotional tool for the other two pillars.
MoviePass admits it has made mistakes and it appear to be trying to remedy them with the hard-learned lessons of 2018. The MoviePass subscription service recently relaunched with 3 new pricing plans and now this new business model is another attempt by the service to regain its footing.
If this strategy works as intended, MoviePass can generate its own revenue and won’t be burning cash with the hopes of striking lucrative deals with entrenched parts of the industry. It’s obviously too early to say if that will be the case and one day’s stock increase is no guarantee that MoviePass has turned a corner, but it’s still a positive sign that shows that there is some optimism in the financial sector that this is a step in the right direction for the service.
Stay tuned to CinemaBlend for all your movie news and check out our 2019 Release Schedule to keep track of the biggest movies headed your way this year.
