ChrisTelclear

Why the hell are we talking about Passengers?!

It's international holds have been impressive.

Keep in mind if you cancel your subscription you are banned for a period of time. Not sure what that is.

I concur, stick to the rules, I do. Just wanted to share what I knew so if you're tempted to try something you understand how it might be discovered by MP. I got a monthly subscription, so I'm safe there, but I do understand some of the concerns raised, because when they go under they could leave everyone stranded, you'll never get that money back.

I don't know if anyone has answered, but it's easy to use. Basically it's an inactivated debit card. You use the app to authorize the purchase, and they activate your card for 30 mins. Then you go to a kiosk and just use it like a credit card to pay for your ticket. As for some of the workarounds, like using it to buy 3D tickets or IMAX and whatnot, just be careful. That transaction will require you going to a human ticketing agent, (who may give you a hard time, especially if it's AMC) to pay the difference. You should use cash to pay the delta, don't try to do a double transaction payment with another card. I think there's a way for them to tell you did that, at least that's what I've heard. A work around for blocked showings, like they did with Red Sparrow, is you can just select another movie that starts at roughly the same time, but when you go to the kiosk just select the movie you wanted and swipe. It has no idea what ticket you're buying. They have started a thing where they want you to submit a picture of your ticket stub to ensure you're not cheating, but they are notifying people by e-mail if they are selected to do that, it's a test right now. There's also a chat feature that you can use if the showing you want isn't listed. They authorize the purchase manually. I've heard some people actually used that to buy Red Sparrow tickets, even though they were blocked on the app, if true I guess they don't do much analysis they just assume it's ok and activate. Enjoy!

I'm hoping they add Angelika and some of the other independents soon. That would be another way to build up slowly, work with smaller chains and show how you can move audiences to those theaters. At some point, if you don't go belly up first, you get to the stage where one of the big chains will talk to you, then you can start making some money. I'm going to ride the wave until it crashes on shore. If I can get a year out of them I'll have made a good investment.

Absolutely. Even if you only go to 2 movies a month you're saving a ton of money, and seeing more movies! Do you like going alone though? That's been a problem for some, finding a buddy to go with that also has MP. I have one friend that has it so it works really well for me. I will also go alone, if necessary.

I think that may have been what MP was trying to establish when they blocked Red Sparrow. How many people went to something else? How many paid full price and went to see the movie anyway? I'm not sure how they planned to find out that information, I would assume they are working with data analysts to find patterns. But you can see the mindset of MP users, I've seen a few movies only because I was in my free MP zone, and I've also seen movies multiple times because if it. Neither would've happened without it, I don't have that much money. The poster above said they have seen their movies for the year, and the rest is "gravy". That's how a lot of MP users think, and it's that mindset which will translate into a bigger impact on theater attendance for a given movie. This why MP is trying to expand it's user base by any means possible, because they need to find a way to make an impact or they will be dead. They need a partnership with theaters, and with movie studios or this won't work. I'm not sure what they number is, maybe 10% across the board, not sure. One thing I do know, I'm paying every month, and I'm going to one movie if it kills me, because I don't like paying for nothing. If that increases overall attendance for MP users by say 5 movies a year, what is that impact? One area I think MP needs to find a way to tap into is seniors. They attend movies a lot during the day, and really would be big users of MP if the technology wasn't so scary to them. I'd be hitting up a partnership with AARP if I were them, it's a gold mine.

I don't think they are targeting the tentpoles, I think they are trying to establish themselves as the savior of the mid-budget/indie movie, which are most of the movies in theaters. Look at some of the titles it's helped the most; Game Night, Red Sparrow, Annihilation, The Post, 3 Billboards. When you look at the total number of tickets sold vs. the percentage sold from MP, that tells you the real story of the impact. For Red Sparrow for instance: tickets sold via MP: 300000 Total tickets sold: 4797900 Percentage via MP: 6% or $2.7M at the box office. (and that's after they blocked Red Sparrow on opening weekend in their little experiment, it might have been considerably higher had they not done that) For Game Night: tickets sold via MP: 500000 Total tickets sold: 6621400 Percentage via MP: 7.5% or $4.5M at the box office. These aren't huge numbers, but they are significant to a lower budget movie. Black Panther was only about 1.4% of total sales.

None of those are adult comedy's. Sherlock Gnomes?! How would that take traffic away from Game Night?! Totally different audience.

Game Night isn't really all that surprising if you realize you're looking at the only adult comedy in wide release for the past month. There's no competition.

Really? mother! made $2.5M, I would think this would do much better that nightmare.

Still awaiting releases in France, Japan and Russia.

I think that depends on how long Fox sticks with it in theaters.

The first one works as a standalone movie. My guess is they were hedging their bets as to whether it would be successful enough and made it so it worked either way.

It's really pretty simple. Two words, "Rotten Tomatoes". The US public has come to rely on that shit site far too much to decide if they should go to see a movie. The studios need to come up with an effective strategy to minimize the damage from RT. You need look no further than TR, and also Red Sparrow, to see that. Sparrow is doing good business overseas, and it has a double albatross here, the RT score, and the "exploitation" police.

This is exactly right, well said. What offended critics is that Aurora forgives him and they live happily every after. He didn't pay a price for his very human mistake. I'll also add that many critics intentionally misrepresented what was shown in the movie in their reviews. They called it "Dape Rape", which it was not "Stockholm Syndrome" which it's clearly not, they demonized the movie to a level I've never seen before. To this day I'll see a random tweet saying these words. "Just watched Passengers, it was a good movie, I don't see what the problem was with critics".

I've seen it twice, big Jlaw stan here, but yeah, I wasn't enamored of it the first time. But when I watched it the second time, just like you said, things cleared up for me, I understood it better, and she's just great in the role. I suspect, like many of her recent movies, it's going to do very well in the secondary market as people slowly discover it through others who've seen it and liked it. Passengers did amazing in the secondary market, it just needed to distance itself from those misguided charges of date rape and stalking the critics kept harping on so people would give it a chance.

...how bad it is.

There are a couple of things going on here. One is it was going to be tough to penetrate this market with Black Panther sucking up all the attention. The fact is, it opened at #2, with mixed reviews, and it's an old school spy thriller that wasn't going to appeal to the under 25 crowd which has been raised on Jason Boring and Mission Improbable. What surprised me after I saw it was that Fox didn't insist in upping the action in this, (and not only the ass-kicking kind of action, if you know what I mean). I've read the books, and there is an opportunity for a couple of kick ass action sequences, and sex scenes, that would've perked up the proceedings a bit. IMO it's doing ok for what it is, and I'd argue that the only reason it is doing this well is because of Jennifer Lawrence. It also cost too much, and it's mostly because her salary is in the stratosphere for this level of budget. The speculation is it was $15-$20M from what I read, and the movie was $70M to make. She was over 25% of the budget if she got $20M. If she wants to do these mid-level budgeted movies she needs to take less up front salary. But hey, if Fox is willing to pay, you take the money and run.

Latest #1 BP 25.7% #2 Wrinkle 20.3% #3 Red Sparrow 6.2% #4 Peter Rabbit 5.7% #5 ICOI 5.5% - that was a quick fade What's the story with this? Free previews?

They have people frauding them. They want some people to prove they bought the ticket. I guess you could activate it, and then use it nearby to buy something else. It's just an activated debit card, it doesn't really know what you're buying. Another thing people can do, if MP is blocking a showing, like they did for Red Sparrow when it opened, you can just selected another movie starting at the same time, get it activated, then go to the kiosk and select the blocked movie. It defeats the block. I don't think this will be a long term solution for them. Once they grow to a certain size they'd go broke hiring people to check out the pictures of the stubs, unless they develop some AI that can read it for them.

Problem is the chains don't want to work with them. MoviePass has made a few missteps, and one was they should've talked to the chains before starting and got some, or at least one, of them on board. They could've customized the service for each chain and just kind of be a service provider. This is more complicated than the Netflix model, Netflix just has to work with the content providers, MoviePass has to work with multiple entities.

Yeah, that 57 is up from 55 earlier, and it will probably continue to rise. The 82 for DW is probably because only people who saw and liked the originals are going to see it, and it's basically delivering what they expected. However, the Trump supporters are very active, they had inundated both her, and the movies, hashtag last night trying to rally people around Death Wish. These are people that during the election would go to online polls and flood them with votes supporting positions of Trump. So it's entirely possible they are attacking the review sites, RT is the biggest, then IMDb.

You have to wonder how much last nights MoviePass problem with Red Sparrow affected that number. It was fairly widespread.