"Movie Pass, Movie Crash" -- Movie Review

 

Recently at Lincoln Center, I attended an advance screening of the new HBO documentary, “Movie Pass, Movie Crash”. 

Synopsis

When the Movie Pass business seems to become successful, can it stay afloat in the face of insufficient revenue and dishonest executive management?

Story

In a seemingly short eight year period, a revolutionary new company called Movie Pass came and went with considerable fanfare.  Upon its arrival, it seemed like a creative way to get people back into movie theaters and less reliant on streaming services:  for a monthly fee, you could see an almost unlimited amount of movies at nearly any theater.  This would be a great deal for consumers as it would not only bring down the cost of attending a movie but also get them to see a particular film they liked multiple times if they so desired.  Ostensibly, it should also have proved to be beneficial to the theaters themselves since people would tend to spend more money at the concession stands, where they make most of their revenue. 

What originally started as a well-intentioned idea evolved into a nightmare for not only customers but also the founders of the company.  First of all, the company was in danger of abruptly ending because of its own success:  they had so many subscribers at such a cheap price that they weren’t able to afford to sustain the business model – as a result, investors grew increasingly skeptical and reluctant to put up more money to keep the company going.  Also, there was some question as to whether the co-founder had enough business acumen to manage the company on their own, so it was encouraged to take on more senior level management who had this experience. 

When a couple of men were hired to run the company in place of its original creators, that’s when all hell broke loose.  These two were making the rounds of all the business shows on cable TV claiming that Movie Pass was their baby and further misrepresented themselves as far as their background was concerned (one claimed that he had run Netflix, which could not have been further from the truth, as further investigation turned out).  They wound up living their best life, spending company money throwing extravagant parties under the justification that they were promoting the Movie Pass brand and raising its visibility to interest subscribers and investors.  But when their scheme blew up the company, what would happen next?

 

Review

“Movie Pass, Movie Crash” is a great lesson in how not to run a business.  It is also a great lesson in how expanding a growing business can be taken over by a bunch of hucksters looking to perform what the mob tends to refer to as a “bust-out” on a neophyte’s business.  Either way, there is much to be learned from a surreal experience suffered by innocents who had a worthwhile idea, despite possible flaws in the business model.  Movie Pass seemed to good to be true for movie lovers – and in the end, it turned out that it was precisely that.  But in the end, after its destruction, can this Phoenix resurrect itself from the ashes? 

One obvious question that arises here is how much of the company’s downfall was racially based?  The two men who created Movie Pass were young African-American and the executives who took over the company – and eventually squeezed-out its founders – were older white men who (theoretically) had more executive experience at running a company.  As the public (white) faces of the company, potential investors and venture capitalists were more likely to see slightly-gray-haired white men as having more credibility when it came to running the company as compared to a couple of younger Black men.     

Following the screening, there was an interview with the filmmaker and the company founders.  Stacey said that at the time he got fired, Movie Pass was  featured as an up and coming company.  Director Muta'Ali Muhammad said that both Stacy and Hamet were the heart of the story; he started out by creating a short in order to sell the longer concept to HBO.  Stacy and Hamet originally created the company in order to make movie going easy.  The director wasn’t sure of the structure of his documentary but found his ending when Stacey decided to purchase the company once it went into bankruptcy; he went to court and made an offer for $150,000.  Upon regaining control of the company, he added geo-location of theaters; it now operates on a 23% profic margin thanks to a five year deal with MasterCard.