MoviePass Wants to Acquire Its Own Movies
Not content to simply offer an inexplicably cheap subscription service for movie theaters, MoviePass is now getting into the movie-making business. The company is launching “MoviePass Ventures” which will be a “wholly-owned subsidiary founded to co-acquire films with film distributors.”
They announced the news at the Sundance Film Festival this week. Deadline offers this quote from MoviePass CEOMitch Lowe:
We’ve experienced enormous success bringing people back into the theaters since our launch in August and with an influx of business from distributors, have proven the impact of our marketing over and over again, giving them an incremental lift in ticket sales. Given the successes we have demonstrated for our distributor partners in ensuring strong box office in the theatrical window, it’s only natural for us to double down and want to play alongside them – and share in the upside.
MoviePass execs say their product is driving people to movies they might not otherwise see, and accounts for 10 percent or more of the box-office grosses of smaller fare like Call Me By Your Name and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. They claim that creates “greater downstream revenues on all platforms.” Sort of a trickle-down economics of movies; they boost film’s profile in theaters, thus increasing their opportunities to make money in other areas.
I suppose if you own a piece of all that other money, that could help a company that is charging $10 for all the movies you can watch in a month when a single ticket in some places costs $12 or $15. I won’t begin to pretend how the economics of that works, but they seem pretty confident they can find the profit in there somehow. And if they start bringing great little movies to theaters, I won’t complain.
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