Former MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe reflects on the company's dramatic rise and fall: "It was really embarrassing and hurtful"

By slashing prices, Mitch Lowe turned MoviePass into a supernova.

The ticketing service, which had ambitions to become the Netflix of cinema, had languished for decades. years until Lowe took the reins in 2017 when Helios and Matheson, an analytics company, bought a majority stake. At the same time, Lowe announced that for a monthly fee of $9.95, users could now watch one movie a day in theaters, less than the cost of a single ticket in major cities like New York and Los Angeles. It was an offer too good to refuse, pushing MoviePass to 2 million customers in about six months. But it was also a risky proposition, which caused the company to burn tens of millions of dollars and collapse dramatically two years later.

"It was really embarrassing and hurtful," Lowe says. "I tried as hard as I could, but I should have tried harder. I should have been more thoughtful and I should have been more strategic. But I have to live with that.

Now Lowe makes sense of that mad dash and his stints as a senior executive at MoviePass and Redbox in a new memoir, "Watch and Learn: How I Flipped Hollywood With Netflix, Redbox, and Moviepass," which went on sale Sept. 6. In it, Lowe makes mistakes. MoviePass should have had a waiting list, he admits, which could have allowed it to ramp up more slowly and better serve its customers. And he made a mistake by owning a publicly traded company in Helios and Matheson, because that meant all the money he hemorrhaged could be tracked in real time. But he still thinks the MoviePass model might have worked.

"Given enough time and enough money and a little luck here and there, we would have could have been a success," says Lowe. "But in any plan you have to be flexible. Looking back, I didn't change things fast enough. I was just headlong trying to work through the issues of the day. .

In his book, Lowe reveals that MoviePass nearly signed deals with Imax and negotiated with Ari Emanuel about selling the service to WME. But neither pact was finalized - Helios chief Ted Farnsworth thought Emanuel wasn't up to MoviePass with his offer and wanted more money up front.

While its popularity initially skyrocketed, Lowe says the company acted debaucherously. In 2018, he rented a twenty-three thousand square foot mansion from the Sundance Film Festival and brought in a high-end caterer for the parties he hosted at home. At Coachella, the company spent $1 million on an event.

"That was definitely the wrong thing to do," says Lowe. “The idea behind it was to raise awareness in the entertainment community. We were desperately trying to build allies. /p>

MoviePass was resurrected by its original founder Stacy Spikes, who bought it out of bankruptcy in 2022 , but Lowe says he's not sure how the company will be restructured.

Regarding his own failed vision, Lowe argues that MoviePass could have been profitable by attracting moviegoers more casual, which would compensate for the regulars who had the ticketing service drowned in red ink. And he also thinks the company could have increased its subscription revenue by selling data to studios about its customers and making deals with movie chains for cheaper tickets. Instead, big chains, like AMC, cried foul, threatening...