With an image of a phoenix emblazoned on a screen behind him, Stacy Spikes, the founder of MoviePass, announced on Thursday that the controversial and service will relaunch this summer. Spikes, a former film marketing executive and producer, who founded the ticketing service in 2011 before getting pushed out of the company after it was acquired by analytics firm Helios and Matheson in 2018, said that MoviePass is being reimagined as a cooperative. It will also use virtual currency and tiered pricing plans.

“We want to rebuild MoviePass as a company that’s built by its fanbase,” Spikes said in a presentation at New York City’s Lincoln Center.

But there were still many questions that were left unanswered. Namely, Spikes did not give pricing information for the various plans that MoviePass will begin offering in just a few short months.

It’s been a long and rocky road to arrive at this point. After toiling in obscurity for years, MoviePass became a household name in 2017 with its too-good-to-be-true (at least if you want to remain solvent) $9.95 monthly subscription for one movie per day. That was less than the cost of a single movie ticket, but MoviePass made vague claims that somehow the math would work out after it sold data to studios and other companies. But even as the company attracted scores of customers, its losses kept mounting.

In a last-ditch effort to prevent bankruptcy, MoviePass in 2018 rolled out a refashioned “unlimited” option for $14.95 per month offering one movie daily with restrictions. In September 2019, MoviePass notified subscribers that it would be shutting down indefinitely and
in January 2020, MoviePass’ parent Helios and Matheson Analytics filed for Chapter 7 liquidation.

“A lot of people lost money, a lot of people lost trust,” Spikes said. “There were a lot of people who were hurt and disappointed, and I was one of the people who was hurt and disappointed.”

But MoviePass did successfully reshape the theatrical landscape. It served as a disruptive force, inspiring theater chains such as AMC and Regal to launch their own subscription services. Spikes acknowledged that the competitive scene has been dramatically altered since he first came up with the idea for MoviePass, but he thinks there’s room for a service that isn’t aligned with one particular chain.

“If it benefits one theater chain it’s really a loyalty program,” Spikes said. “Our goal is to create a marketplace where all theaters, all movies, all titles, all parts of the market benefit.”

Spikes previously told Insider that his bid for the MoviePass assets was less than $250,000, which was the original minimum set by the bankruptcy trustee. As previously reported, MoviePass’ customer data was not part of the sale.

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