After announcing a price increase and then immediately reversing it at the end of July, MoviePass spent yet another weekend making headlines for all the wrong reasons. According to a New York Post report, the service crashed once again on Friday, but before it went down, users discovered that they were only being offered two possible screenings: the poorly-reviewed Slender Man and Mission: Impossible – Fallout at inconvenient hours.
The report specifically cited the AMC Empire 25 in Times Square, NYC, where the only two showtimes on the app for the new Mission: Impossible were at 2:30 PM and 10:45 PM. As the Post notes, Fallout has a runtime of 147 minutes, which means anyone who attended the late screening wouldn’t leave the theater until close to 2 AM.
“Unfortunately, in order to stay financially stable we’ve had to curtail the service,” MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe said to the Post. “We had to right the ship as far as the amount of money we were burning.”
Lowe explained that this is one of the ways that the company is attempting to stay afloat through the middle of next month, which is when everyone but the yearly subscribers will have been moved over to the new plan, which will only allow them to attend three screenings a month (albeit for the same $9.95 monthly subscription).
He did say that the inconvenient showtimes were not deliberate though, and that in the coming weeks, showtimes throughout the day will be available on the app again. “This has been a challenging time for us and our customers,” he added. “We’re just trying to save our service to be able to be available long term.”
