The MoviePass experiment continues to fascinate us. For the low price of $9.95 a month, members to the MoviePass service can go to a movie theater and watch one movie a day, every day, for the month. Knowing that a movie ticket can cost anywhere from $7.50 to $14 depending on where you live, the MoviePass membership can pay for itself with two trips to the theater per month. Anything over that is money saved. At least, for now.
After luring in members with its innovative concept, MoviePass has updated its terms of service in a key way, now stating:
MoviePass reserves the right to change the rules of movie-going attendance and ticket availability to members in connection with the Service at anytime. MoviePass reserves the right to change from time to time the number of eligible movies a member can see per month. MoviePass reserves the right to offer members a new price option if they exceed watching a certain amount of movies per month.
I'm sorry, but what? The whole point of the MoviePass subscription was that, for under $10 a month, you could go to the movies IN the theaters once a day, every day, so long as you paid your membership. In theory, the movie theaters would benefit from this because they earn their money off of concession sales, and even if you skipped snacks every other trip, you likely would drop some money on food during a screening.
But this term basically builds in a safeguard for MoviePass that if a member "abuses" the system by possibly going to the movie theater every day in a given month, the company has the right to change the number of eligible movies that person can see in a given month. You have heard of "Use it or lose it?" This sounds more like "Use it too much and you might lose it."
In the same term, which you can read in full right here, MoviePass explains that users will be notified of any price changes made to the terms of service before the next billing cycle occurs. And if you are told by MoviePass that you can only see a certain number of films per month at the $9.95 membership fee, then you will have 14 days to cancel your subscription.
But knowing that there might be an invisible cap on the number of movies that you can see in one month, would that cause you to press pause on registering for MoviePass? Or do you think that it's fair for the company to say "Enough" if you try to take advantage of the pass on a daily basis, as advertised?
This poll is no longer available.
