The day has finally come.
MoviePass, the troubled film subscription service that offered customers the ability to see one movie in theaters per day for a monthly fee, announced Friday it's shutting down Sept. 14, Variety reports. The company said its "efforts to recapitalize" have "not been successful" and that after shutting down tomorrow, it's "unable to predict if or when the MoviePass service will continue."
Officially launched in 2011, MoviePass received a flood of new subscribers in 2017 after dropping its monthly subscription fee to a stunningly cheap $9.95, less than the price of a single movie ticket in most major cities. Naturally, the company, which essentially gave subscribers a debit card and paid for their movies, quickly began to hemorrhage cash and presented subscribers with various issues and restrictions; service interruptions were frequent, and a report last month alleged the company even changed some users' passwords intentionally in order to shut them out of their accounts in a desperate bid to save money.
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Last year, MoviePass stopped offering the original one-movie-a-day plan, restricting users to three films per month, although it later brought back a version of the "unlimited" plan.
Since the rise of MoviePass, theater chains like AMC and Regal have adopted similar models with monthly subscription services of their own, albeit without the spotty service and legally dubious activity. But after clinging onto dear life longer than most thought possible, the company that started it all is finally calling cut.
