MoviePass, MovieCrash Review: HBO Doc on the Rise and Fall of MoviePass

You’ve probably heard of MoviePass; maybe you’ve even used it or had a subscription at one point. The service had 3 million users in the U.S. at its peak. HBO Original’s documentary Moviepass, MovieCrash, by award-winning filmmaker Muta’Ali and produced by Mark Wahlberg, charts MoviePass’s astronomical ascent to become the fastest-growing subscription service since Spotify, through to its catastrophic bankruptcy, losing over $150 million in 2017 alone.

The documentary charts the company’s rights from the visionary beginnings of its entrepreneur co-founders to its impressive early success and early downfall. A cautionary tale about a wild ride of mismanagement and corporate greed, HBO’s new documentary delves straight into this story, which continues to be such an object of fascination.

MoviePass began as a ticketing model for cinephiles. Founded in 2011 by entrepreneurs Stacy Stokes and Hamet Watt, who slowly built the business to 20,000 subscribers. In 2016, they brought in former Redbox and Netflix exec Mitch Lowe to be CEO and began to further expand the business; the following year, Lowe spearheaded a partnership with the data analytics company Helios and Matheson (HMNY), run by Ted Farnsworth.

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HMNY bought a majority stake in MoviePass, and in 2017, Lowe and Farnsworth implemented the “too good to be true” $9.95 subscription offer in a bid to bring in hoards of customers and boost the company’s stock value. It worked; hundreds of thousands of people signed up, ballooning its stock price by more than 1000 percent. But MoviePass wasn’t set up for this influx, and its servers repeatedly crashed. Farnsworth got investors to pump millions into the business, promising a payoff once MoviePass sold user data and reached solvency.

A combination of extravagant and fraudulent spending, with lavish parties at the Sundance Film Festival, Cannes, and Coachella, coupled with a fundamentally irresponsible and unsustainable business model, led the company to abrupt bankruptcy in 2019. Between ceasing operations in 2019 and filing for bankruptcy in 2020, the company was embroiled in further scandals over reports of wire fraud, securities fraud, and significant data breaches.

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MoviePass, MovieCrash chart the companies from the full 360 perspective. It features candid interviews with the company’s co-founders, the former CEO Mitch Lowe, employees, investors, subscribers, and industry analysts, as well as the journalists at Business Insider who first reported on the … story. It’s a rigorous look at this catastrophic failure from all angles. The documentary begins, satisfyingly, with a MoviePass subscriber and fanatic moviegoers featured throughout, but the real story centers around Stokes and Watt, who are finally allowed to tell their version of the story and the infuriating story of the systemic racism behind MoviePass’s collapse.

Although Lowe features in the whole documentary, it’s clear from the start whose side we are on. The narrative focuses on the company’s two black founders, and their story speaks to the wider marginalization of black founders in America. One of the reasons for bringing in new CEO Mitch Lowe was their lack of access to VC [1-3% of all VC funding in America goes to women or minorities]. What’s worse, when Lowe came on board and started upping the anti and lowering the subscription fees, when Watt and Spikes expressed skepticism about the unsustainable and unsustainable business model, they were removed from the board.

It’s cautiously hinted at the Hudson Bay Capital, the hedge fund providing much of the money used to keep MoviePass afloat, had sinister intent in their financing. But the documentary doesn’t go much further than suggestion.

This crisply edited and well-rounded documentary goes beyond the MoviePass headlines to delve into a larger story of corporate greed, giving us a myriad of different perspectives and ultimately laying bare the crooked intentions of the big businessmen who propped up the venture in search of their own profits.

Photo Credit: HBO