MoviePass is relaunching its service: Watch the announcement live here – CNET

MoviePass is getting its big relaunch moment, starting Thursday with a livestream at 3 p.m ET (12 p.m. PT) in which the movie ticket service’s new plans are expected to be revealed. The livestream will be on MoviePass’s website and also in the above YouTube embed from the CNET Highlights channel.

The MoviePass reveal comes after the service was acquired by co-founder Stacy Spikes, who previously worked on MoviePass as far back as 2005. Spikes saw MoviePass through its 2011 launch until 2018, when he was fired while the service was owned by the now-defunct Helios and Matheson Analytics.

Spikes told CNET in November that despite MoviePass’s roller coaster of issues that led to its 2019 shutdown, there is still a subscription business opportunity in the cinema market.

“It’s post-COVID. We’re living in a different world. We’re trying to get people back to going to movies, and all I kept thinking to myself was, ‘Can we get back in the ring and try and help drive traffic to cinema?'” Spikes said in our interview.

In the years since MoviePass left the field, several US movie theater companies have launched their own ticket services. Rivals from AMC, Regal and Alamo Drafthouse are still in operation and range between $15 to $30 a month depending on a customer’s region.

MoviePass internal data from 2018 that will be part of Thursday’s presentation, first published by Insider and independently confirmed by CNET, shows that the service drove as much as 20% of ticket sales for certain movies that year. MoviePass also estimates that the service drove 4% of overall ticket sales across the US market in 2018.

Sorry to Bother You received 19.4% of its ticket sales from MoviePass, according to the data, followed by Annihilation with 18.3% and Isle of Dogs with 15.3%.

It’s worth noting that MoviePass was experimenting wildly with its service in 2018, at times including surge pricing, limiting some plans to three movies a month and mandating requests for customers to take pictures of movie ticket stubs to combat abuse. That ticket-verification program, among other issues, eventually led to the Federal Trade Commission scolding MoviePass in 2021 for deceptive practices and inadequate data collection.

This story will be updated as the MoviePass event gets underway.