This doesn’t sound desperate at all. Fresh on the heels of announcing a price increase then immediately reversing it, the service crashing, then drastically limiting choices, now troubled MoviePass has apparently stepped in it again. This time, the company has been sending out emails to some users who’ve tried to cancel — email that say those customers have instead been, ah, moved into a new subscription plan.
Meet Cristen Brinkerhoff, a MoviePass subscriber who cancelled her plan at the end of July after the company said it would be raising prices and capping access to the biggest new films. She shared her emails with MoviePass with The Verge, adding that a little less than a week after canceling, she got a new email communicating with her like she was still a subscriber. And then yesterday, she got an email from the service that said, in part: “We received your confirmation for your new MoviePass plan.”
Say what?
Here’s a tweet from another angry subscriber:
Heads up to anyone who canceled MoviePass.
SURPRISE: You didn’t cancel MoviePass, and now you’re automatically enrolled in the “new” plan. 🎉 @MoviePass is that even legal?? Y’all shady af now. pic.twitter.com/kPMETe8xdw
— Courtney Guth (@Courtney_Guth) August 13, 2018
Making matters even worse, some users are even reporting issues when they try to re-cancel their subscriptions after figuring out they’ve been re-enrolled against their wishes.
One explanation, according to The Verge, is that MoviePass didn’t process anyone’s cancellations until the end of their billing periods. “When its leadership decided to modify its plan and walk back its price increase, the company may have negated any cancellations as a way to retain its subscribers,” the outlet reported. “But it’s unclear why MoviePass is using language like ‘opt-in’ without actually giving users a choice to continue using its service. It’s also unclear if this is more of a logistical mistake on the company’s end or a deliberate move to retain unwilling customers. MoviePass did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.”
This is an additional black eye for the company on top of news we reported yesterday. After announcing a price increase and then immediately reversing it at the end of July, MoviePass crashed once again on Friday.
Before it went down, users also discovered that they were only being offered two possible screenings: the poorly-reviewed Slender Man and Mission: Impossible – Fallout, both at inconvenient hours.
A New York Post report 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.
Update: In a statement, MoviePass said the company learned today that “some members encountered difficulty with the cancellation process. We have fixed the bugs that were causing the issue and we have confirmed that none of our members have been opted-in or converted to the new plan without their express permission. In addition, all cancellation requests are being correctly processed and no members were being blocked from canceling their accounts. We apologize for the inconvenience and ask that any impacted members contact customer support via the MoviePass app.”
