Already at Movie Theaters Near You: Ticket Subscriptions

Author: Brooks Barnes / Source: New York Times

MoviePass, the subscription-based movie ticket service, is struggling to stay afloat. But the payment model it has popularized appears to be here to stay.

AMC Theaters, the largest multiplex chain in the United States, rolled out its own MoviePass-style service on Tuesday.

For $20 a month, subscribers to AMC Stubs A-List can see up to three movies a week. Also last week, the Alamo Drafthouse chain said it would begin testing a service called Season Pass that would offer unlimited movies for one monthly price.

“We really like the subscription model,” said Tim League, chief executive of Alamo Drafthouse, which operates in 10 states. “But we want to get it right. It’s important to us to build a model that is sustainable for the long term.”

AMC also said that its service was “sustainable” — a not-so-subtle shot at MoviePass, which has three million members, most of whom pay $10 a month for the ability to see a movie a day. Many people in Hollywood and on Wall Street think that MoviePass will fail because it loses money on heavy users; Helios and Matheson Analytics, which owns MoviePass, has seen its publicly traded shares fall from $38.86 last year to 31 cents on Friday.

Theater companies are racing to introduce subscriptions in part because Netflix, Spotify and Amazon Prime have trained people — millennials, in particular — to expect entertainment to be served up that way. Finding new ways to fill seats is critical: admissions in North America fell to a 25-year low last year, even as the population grew about 27 percent over that period.

Here is a look at prominent movie ticket subscription offers:

MoviePass

Still the dominant service, despite mounting questions about whether it can survive. It had more than three million paying members as of June 13. MoviePass executives aggressively insist that the company is viable and say membership could swell to roughly 5 million by January. On Monday, Helios and Matheson said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that it hoped to raise $1.

2 billion over three years to fund growth.

The goal is to quickly become the Incredible Hulk — and get too big to stop. At that point, MoviePass could make money by striking bulk ticket pricing partnerships with theaters; charging studios fees to promote new films to members; and perhaps even growing big enough (20 million subscribers is a goal) to demand a slice of concession revenue. MoviePass is also expected to charge subscribers more for

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