AMC Beats MoviePass at Its Own Game
by EG
The AMC theater chain was never happy with the MoviePass business model, and now AMC's own movie subscription program seems to be doing much better than the struggling MoviePass. Read on for details.
After launching seven weeks ago, AMC Theatres' rival ticket-subscription program to MoviePass accounts for five percent of all attendance at the country's largest movie chain. Put another way, that means one million moviegoers.
AMC's Stubs A-List allows patrons to see up to three movies a week in any format, including Imax, for $19.95 a month.
The theater circuit on Thursday also announced that the number of subscribers in the program jumped from 175,000 on July 31 to 260,000 as of this week. That includes 85,000 enrollments in the last two weeks, just as MoviePass raised its price from $9.95 to $14.95 a month and limited the number of films a person can see to three titles monthly.
And just as AMC announced its news on Thursday, MoviePass imposed further restrictions on users by making only six movies available at a time. On Tuesday, MoviePass parent Helios and Matheson Analytics posted a staggering quarterly loss just as a class-action lawsuit was made public as shareholders seek some compensation after watching the value of their stock sink 99 percent in less than a month.
In terms of the amount of business that AMC's monthly service brings in, actual subscribers account for 4 percent of the chain's weekly attendance. But because the subscription program allows full-ticket prices to be bought during the reservation process, AMC reports that the overall figure is actually 5 percent.
Get the rest of the story at The Hollywood Reporter.
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