Cinephiles talk about the “MoviePass summer” with the same wistful nostalgia as hippies recalling the Summer of Love, like it’s an impossible dream so utopian that it might have been a collective hallucination.
In August 2017, the startup MoviePass – a company conceived to sell subscriptions under which users paid a monthly fee in exchange for movie tickets – announced a radical new pricing structure offering one admission a day for a paltry $9.95 each month. Moviegoers immediately realized that the service would pay for itself within a single use, and use it they did; attendance soared, particularly in metropolitan markets with robust repertory scenes, where obsessives enthusiastically accepted the implicit challenge to go to the pictures every day. One afternoon, to kill a few hours between appointments in Manhattan, I checked into a multiplex with MoviePass just so I’d have somewhere dark and cool to take a nap. On days when I didn’t plan on catching a screening, I’d check in anyway if I passed a theater, just to move some cash into the pocket of a valued local business. It was all Monopoly money anyway, not even real, or at least not real to the average consumer. Squaring the balance would be someone else’s problem.
