PSA: MoviePass Still Around, Still Terrible

Remember when MoviePass was actually good? It seems like lifetimes ago, so distant and unattainable now, like a glorious dream that fades immediately after waking up. Once upon a time, we could see one movie a day for a low, low price; we could ravenously consume anything the marquee offered, follow every filmic whim without any financial fear, and we did. It was fun, it was wonderful, it was all too pure to last. First came the surge pricing, then the limited movie choices, and then the whole thing imploded spectacularly and everyone fled the service for the greener pastures of AMC Stubs A-List or the now-defunct Sinemia.

But here's the thing: MoviePass is still around somehow, even if you're not using it—and it's just as depressing as it was the last time you checked!

Over the holiday weekend—one of the biggest movie weekends of the year—the few masochistic people still using MoviePass discovered that the app had randomly gone dark for "updates," CNN reports. And the company swears the timing was purely incidental.

"There’s never a good time to have to do this," MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe said in a statement to subscribers. "But to complete the improved version of our app, one that we believe will provide a much better experience for our subscribers, it has to be done."

It's unclear what, exactly, MoviePass was changing, or when it will be back, but the company says the supposed update could take at least "a few weeks." Weeks that include the releases of massive summer blockbusters like Spider-Man: Far From Home, Disney's live-action Lion King remake, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but, uh, that has nothing to do with the MoviePass outage at all. Strictly just a technical thing! Seriously!

According to Lowe, MoviePass has "listened and we understand the frustrations of our subscribers, and the update is a necessary change. "To provide the level of service you deserve and we can be proud of," he said, "we need to improve our mobile app."

Of course, that makes it sound like the update is going to address bugs in the app or whatever, which isn't exactly the main frustration of MoviePass users. If the company really wanted to "provide the level of service we deserve" or whatever, it wouldn't just randomly shut down exactly when we'd all want to actually use it to go see movies. Oh well. At least there's that terrifying free movie app that forces you to watch commercials for theater tickets, so that's something. The depressing future is here, everybody!