Discount movie ticket subscription service MoviePass will officially cease operations on September 14, finally laying to rest the service that has been slowly deteriorating over the past several years.
Today, Helios and Matheson Analytics, which owns Moviepass, announced that its board of directors has decided to interrupt service for all subscribers while it determines what to do with the company.
In order to make that determination it has created a strategic review committee comprised of the company’s independent directors to “identify, review, and explore all strategic and financial alternatives for the Company, including a sale of the Company in its entirety, a sale of substantially all of the Company’s assets including MoviePass, Moviefone, and MoviePass Films, a business reorganization or one or more other extraordinary corporate transactions, together with the assumption or settlement of the Company’s liabilities in connection with any of these alternatives.”
MoviePass initially began operations in 2011 in San Francisco and has had a tumultuous life from its inception.
In 2011 the service allowed customers to see one movie per day for a set fee. When theaters started to refuse MoviePass customers, it pivoted to instead have users print a voucher at home for entrance to the movie. In 2012, it launched a national beta of the service, providing a debit card for customers to use to buy tickets, but that too was met with resistance from movie theaters.
The service has changed hands and shifted sales strategies a number of times over the years. In July of this year, it once again suspended service for subscribers, a move that it made in the middle of the July 4 holiday weekend. Last month, TechCrunch also reported that tens of thousands of MoviePass customer’s credit card numbers were exposed in a leak.
MoviePass may be dead, but that doesn’t mean movie subscription services are gone. Regal Cinemas launched its own version of MoviePass in July, which it called Regal Unlimited. The plan offers different pricing tiers ranging from $18 to $24 for a monthly subscription to movies shown at Regal theaters.
We’ve reached out to MoviePass for a comment on the company’s announcement and will update this story if and when we receive a response.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?