As promised, MoviePass returns. After launching the beta/waitlist on Labor Day last year, the movie theater subscription service will be open to everyone in the US just before the Memorial Day holiday. After years of rocky history, the company vowed to get back on the straight and narrow, with a more measured approach to new movie access, following the lead of the free-for-all MoviePass 1.0.
“By opening MoviePass to movie lovers across the country, we’re expanding our support for the movie theater industry by helping drive traffic to all theaters during the critical summer season,” 1.0 co-founder and 2.0 CEO Stacy Spikes said in a prepared statement. “Our newly designed service gives our members more choice and flexibility in how they use their monthly credits, while continuing to encourage them to watch movies in theaters.”
The service will launch in the US with four tiers starting at $10 per month – effectively priced like a streaming service. That base level gets you one to three movies a month. If you’re really into new movies and have a lot of free time, a $40 Pro account gets you 30 movies a month — at or near a movie a day, depending on the month. The company says the $20 tier is the most popular of the bunch, with three to seven per month.
It’s a bit complicated when it comes to how many movies you can actually see per pass, as the levels are actually based on “credits.” The number of credits per movie depends on when you see it. Tuesdays use the least, then weekday matinees, weeknights, weekend nights, and opening weekends top the list.
The good news, however, is that credits roll over if you don’t use them all up within a month. The company says “you can have up to two months worth of unused funds in your account at any given time. For example, if your subscription is 34 credits per month, you can have a maximum of 68 credits in your account. ”
Given everything that happened with the original version of the service, some consumers could – understandably – be a little wary. Certainly opening things up for Memorial Day is a great way to bolster the power of the service.