Between 2010 and 2019, a brief period in cinematic history fans of the movies feasted on content and perhaps, a bit too much. This was made possible thanks to a little red debit card called MoviePass, the brainchild of a budding startup which promised utopia to any passionate dit edition who had too much time on their hands to pay a subscription fee once a month, then through an application and a debit card go watch one movie a day, at any cinema, anywhere. If it sounds perfect that’s because it isn’t perfect. After all, how can a company offer an unlimited plan for $9.95 a month and expect to remain profitable if they give you thirty tickets at least the value of that price?
According to a documentary directed by Muta’Ali called MoviePass, MovieCrash, they did not make a profit. And the reasons for such a peculiar business model (as well as the struggling honest employees, which they ruined in the process) are even more difficult to explain than you would expect.
Kudos to Muta’Ali for taking a different aspect of the material which at the end of the day is that of the praises and curses of young start-up businesses which is a story not necessarily cinematic even if the movies are the linchpin of its operation. For we are familiar with the tales of venture capital sharks and the uncontrollable pursuit of capitalist profits sinking even the most revered of ventures, MoviePass assumes the sadistic approach as another story, where such two well meaning young Black men came up with a great scheme that captured the attention of older and whiter men of finance who in a year had obliterated the idea and the business.
In as much as there are no saints in this heaven, there are saints who go by the names of Stacy Spikes and Hamet Watt; they are black people who galloped for the quite novel opportunity of pursuing a vision to devise a business model that fuses a subscription model with movie viewing, and thus mobilizing audiences to spend more at cinemas. For example, we learn about Hamet Watt one of the promising Sykes who at that time was the VP for Miramax the company behind Urbanworld Film Festival among other things.
This pair along with Watt sought to achieve what few Black business entrepreneurs were able to accomplish in the predominantly white business environment to achieve something of value.
The problems began when it was time to actually fund the business and only faced lenders men from the past. This put them in the cross-hairs of Mitch Lowe and Ted Farnsworth, who in a matter of days would transform themselves from being financiers and advisors into replacing Spikes and Watt in the board and the CEO seat come 2016. It is here where the operational changes take place where MoviePass’s business model, which in itself is predictable now moves up the chain from being sustainable, it was they who suggested the $10 per month which was way below the market rate, the last thing that will take subscriber numbers past the magic figure of 20000, and the stock prices of its parent company to a different orbit. In cut-throat interviews, Muta’Ali views the demise of MoviePass as a two-line conflict that of ounce as the quiet intelligent Black businessmen with a solid business model and that of the loud unscrupulous White businessmen who were always brandishing their non-existent muscles, stealing and despoiling any idea they could latch on to.
From there, the documentary follows a linear trajectory although not a fully uninteresting one. Several topics are on the list, such as overselling by Lowe and Farnsworth, this time on the company, during their media tour, or how exactly Muta’Ali gets to the outrageous schemes they’d settled to devise in order to sell the thing.
The weaknesses of MoviePass, MovieCrash fully merge with the drawbacks of these elements, which seemingly do not allow it to go beyond the cliches of a documentary style in its screenplay. As with the other video biographies, co-director Antonie Kalia’s mostly 1-on-1 shooting is broken up with stock footage and number heavy charts showing the success and failure of MoviePass Management’s growth. The film also lacks a seamless chronological narrative, skipping from 2016 to the early years and back, often fumbling over the jumps. And for Christ’s sake, let’s not do that anymore, there has been enough of the trend in which documentaries begin with two-minute previews of themselves Here’s everything we are going to talk about. In brief.
The documentary does grapple with the question of whether MoviePass was a now-failed experiment or something that was always likely to fail, and many interviews with the left room entrepreneurs do overlap about its inability to investigate further.
A thread that is picked up towards the end suggests that Farnsworth’s icon status as a multi-billionaire and an international business mogul is all but a big advertisement and because it is raised towards the end, little time is given to that semi-revelation. Even Spikes is recollected more unfavorably than, say, seeing in his closing minutes an advertisement for his last book helps. Put differently, he puts an opportunistic stain on Spikes as the last minutes of the film pitches his new book.
As we come to the end of the film, he learns that MoviePass might have a future after all Spikes decided to buy the company back in 2021 and intends to do it the way it was supposed to have been done in the first place. Given how terrible the situation of watching films is right now (very few contributed to the box office of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga), and given how late to the race AMC and Regal are to adopting the same model, perhaps he can find a way to make it work. I remember thinking this was too good to be true, considering the devastation it seems to have experienced at the seams as a result of MoviePass, MovieCrash. This was also the case for many other newcomers who wanted to revolutionize an industry but were unable to do so as a result of the industry’s greed.
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