![]() The MoviePass team also still needed to perfect its tech to match the user with the right theaters. Essentially, the company paid back the theaters the full ticket price for the movies that its subscribers were seeing. Using the app, subscribers would find a theater, select a movie and screening time, then go to the kiosk and order the ticket using the prepaid card. To do that they devised a prepaid credit card. Together they raised a combined $1 million from AOL and True Ventures, a San Francisco venture-capital firm.īut when a launch on July 4, 2011, was scrapped because of lack of interest from theaters, Spikes had to start over.įirst Spikes and his team had to find a way around the big chains. Things seemed to turn around after Spikes brought on Hamet Watt as a cofounder. In 2005, they created an SMS-based prototype for purchasing tickets, but they couldn't get a major chain to give it a try. MoviePass began with Spikes, a team of five scrappy 20-something developers, and a phone. "So it was, like, why not make a subscription for moviegoing?" "You could see Netflix, Spotify, Pandora, Hulu - this whole subscription wave was on the horizon," Spikes said. The festival's success got Spikes and executives with Loews Cineplex, one of the big movie chains at the time, thinking. In 1997 he founded the Urbanworld Film Festival, which featured the work of diverse filmmakers, including future stars like Ava DuVernay and Malcolm D. By 1994 he was vice president of marketing at Miramax. In his 20s, he helped market film soundtracks at Sony. As a high-school kid growing up in Houston, Texas, he worked at a video store. Aggressive marketing and questionable practices ![]() Through interviews with over a dozen sources who worked at the company or had a close association with it - many of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because of the nondisclosure agreements they signed - I learned how an idealistic founder's desperate search for cash to keep his company alive led to its swift downfall. Hundreds of pages of SEC documents show, in clinical detail, the gobs of money the company spent trying to keep the lights on, and just how little it was generating. Secrecy hangs over what remains of MoviePass, a company that misled both subscribers and investors, and, according to multiple former employees, made many employees extremely uncomfortable. Since July 4, MoviePass has been shut down to resolve "technical problems." Now, 18 months after Spikes' departure, the once high-flying company is practically dead after losing millions of subscribers in less than two years. "How we got there was messy, but innovation is always messy," he said. Then, in January 2018, just as MoviePass added its millionth subscriber, Farnsworth and Lowe fired him. His dream: a service that allowed you to see everything from summer blockbusters to art-house fare at any time for a monthly fee.įor a while, amid numerous fits and starts and funding crises, it worked. ![]() This spring when I met with Spikes, 51, he still had the slim figure, thin-framed glasses, and big smile he had back when he was hustling to put MoviePass on the map. There was one conspicuous absence at the premiere: Stacy Spikes, the entrepreneur who founded MoviePass in 2011. MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe, John Travolta, and Helios & Matheson Analytics CEO Ted Farnsworth.ĭave Kotinsky/Getty Images Samantha Lee/Business Insider Lowe and Farnsworth, meanwhile, were blocking subscribers out of their accounts and misleading investors, according to multiple former employees - desperate measures designed to keep the company alive. And "Gotti" represented their next big move: moviemaking.īut MoviePass was burning through millions of dollars to keep up with subscriber demand. In fact, if the actor knew more about them, he'd likely have wondered why they were grinning ear to ear.įarnsworth was the CEO of Helios & Matheson Analytics, the parent company of MoviePass, the buzzy movie-ticket-subscription service with ambitions of becoming the next Netflix. Greeting Travolta on the red carpet were Ted Farnsworth and Mitch Lowe, two businessmen who'd made the release possible after they'd taken an equity stake in the film months earlier.īut if Travolta knew who they were, his blank expression in the photos he took with them didn't show it. He'd arrived for the premiere of "Gotti," a biopic of infamous Mafia kingpin John Gotti in which Travolta played the starring role. It often indicates a user profile.Īs the sun set on June 14, 2018, John Travolta stood outside Manhattan's SVA Theatre. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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