They're Already Trying to Reboot MoviePass

When things seem too good to be true, they usually are. Just look at MoviePass. The very concept of the thing seemed suspicious from the start: A movie ticket a day for the wildly low price of $10 a month. We wanted it to work. We prayed that it would stay. But, of course, it could not.

After a brief, glorious run of actually delivering endless movies to users in 2017 and 2018, MoviePass started falling apart—snd its disastrous end was almost as spectacular as the service itself. Convoluted pricing changes! Restrictions on what movies you could see! A secret, bonkers scheme to lock users out of the service by changing their passwords! It was a godawful mess. Finally, after a long and protracted death, MoviePass shut down for good on September 14—but, uh, the former head is already talking about resurrecting the thing, for some reason.

Ted Farnsworth, who ran MoviePass's parent company, Helios and Matheson Analytics Inc., has apparently already submitted an offer to buy his whole baby back, Variety reports.

"I believe there is great unrealized value in MoviePass and we want to rebuild and make sure it reaches its full potential," Farnsworth said in a statement, according to Variety. "I have always believed in the business model and the brand [former MoviePass CEO] Mitch Lowe and I built at MoviePass. There’s tremendous appetite for movie theater ticket subscription."

And, sure, there's no denying that people are hungry for a theater ticket subscription, but after being burned so heinously by MoviePass, is anyone going to actually sign up for the service again? Especially now, in a world with subscription options like AMC Stubs A-List—a service that has yet to randomly go dark on huge film weekends with no warning—an immediate MoviePass reboot doesn't seem like the most lucrative and savvy business move.

"Despite the reams of pulp fiction that have been written about MoviePass, we know what went wrong along the way and the many things that went right," Farnsworth went on. "After all, we built the fastest growing subscription business in the history of merchandising and numerous copycats are out there now trying to capitalize on our model in the theater industry."

Also, it's worth noting that Farnsworth is the guy who once said that MoviePass's original business model was built on losing money, so who knows! If he wants to dump a bunch more money into letting us all go see the nightmare that is Cats without having to actually pay the full ticket price, sure, fine, whatever, bring it on. Just don't leak all our credit card information again, OK?