82 TIME May 9/May 16, 2022
of Movie Pass largely on user fraud—members
sharing cards with one another and otherwise
bypassing the system. Farnsworth did not re-
spond to requests for comment.)
Spikes equates what he experienced with
PTSD. “I was licking my wounds for about two
months when my wife was like, ‘You need to put
some clothes on and get out of the house.’ ” Then,
late last year, he heard from someone working on
a documentary about the rise and fall of Movie-
Pass that nobody had bought the company as-
sets during the bankruptcy auction. He called
the trustee, who said the minimum bid was
$250,000. Spikes talked him down to $140,000.
IN SEPTEMBER 2020, Spikes drove alone from
his home in Manhattan to Hoboken, N.J., donned
two masks, and sat in a theater with 10 other peo-
ple to watch the action fi lm Tenet. The next week-
end he returned to see it again. “He’s my people,
right?” Spikes says of director Christopher Nolan,
who very publicly refused to debut his movie on
a streaming service. “I told my wife, even if I have
to get on a plane to fl y to an open theater, I’m
going to support this movie. And I’ve been at the
movies pretty much every weekend since.”
He’s likely one of the few who can make that
claim. Movie attendance plummeted during the
pandemic: In 2019, 76% of people in the U.S.
and Canada saw at least one movie in theaters. In
2021, that number dropped to 47%. People may
have gotten used to streaming movies at home,
especially since services like Disney+, HBO Max,
and Peacock all launched right before or during
the pandemic.
Every year, the Motion Picture Association re-
leases data on the combined theatrical and home/
mobile entertainment market. In 2019, it found
that global digital spending (which includes pur-
chases and rentals of movies from companies like
Amazon and Apple) made up 48% of the mar-
ket, theatrical sales made up 42%, and purchases
of physical content like DVDs made up 10%. In
2021, digital spending made up 72% of the mar-
ket, theatrical 21%, and physical content 7%.
That digital spending calculation doesn’t even in-
clude the money customers pay for subscriptions
to streaming services like Netfl ix.
The window between a theatrical release and
a streaming release is also shrinking; would-be
moviegoers often have to wait only a few weeks
to stream a movie like The Batman. The Oscar-
winning CODA was released simultaneously on
streaming and in theaters, and studios occasion-
ally skip the theater altogether. Spikes dismisses
the threat of streaming and compares the situ-
ation to when DVDs went mainstream in the
late ’90s. “We forget that we were worried people
would stay home then too,” he says. But Rich
Daughtridge, CEO of the upstart chain Ware-
house Cinemas and president of the Indepen-
dent Cinema Alliance, views the proliferation of
streaming diff erently: “We see our main compe-
tition as the couch.”
Spikes often touts the loyalty of Movie Pass
customers. When he fi rst founded the com-
pany, he was inspired by Steve Jobs’ biogra-
phy to suggest that every employee—including
himself—spend at least one day per month on
the customer- service line. He recalls one not-so-
happy customer who dropped her phone while
running to the theater and demanded the com-
pany buy her a new $600 smartphone. “I was
like, ‘But, ma’am, you dropped your phone,’ ”
he says. “I think I gave her a free month.”
But more often the calls would turn into dis-
cussions about how much Movie Pass mem-
bers adored going to the movies. They hadn’t
abandoned cinema because of Netfl ix. They’d
abandoned it because movie tickets had got-
ten too expensive: movie attendance was al-
ready declining before the pandemic, even as
the box offi ce ballooned thanks to higher ticket
prices. Movie Pass’s relatively low (and later, ab-
surdly low) price tag helped increase its cus-
tomers’ attendance, until those fervent movie-
goers quite literally loved Movie Pass to death.
Persuading moviegoers to return to Movie Pass
may prove less challenging than wooing movie the-
aters. Movie Pass buys tickets for its users directly
from the theater. If it can buy discounted tickets,
in exchange for promoting the theater on its app
and incentivizing customers to go to the movies on
slow- traffi c days, the company can fl ourish. But if
it has to pay full price for tickets, it will have to rely
heavily on other revenue streams like advertising.
Spikes claims that the pandemic has made the-
aters much more open to Movie Pass. “Before, the
conversation was ‘Eh,’ ” says Spikes of his initial
proposal in the 2010s. “Now the conversations
are, ‘Congratulations on buying it. How soon can
you be up?’ So COVID defi nitely did something it
would have taken us years to do.”
My exchanges with theaters were more mea-
sured. The head of a small theater chain, who
asked to remain anonymous because the com-
pany is still considering working with Spikes, said
the customer- service issues that plagued Movie-
Pass at the end of its fi rst run “left a bad taste in
our mouths.” The big chains—AMC, Regal, and
Cinemark—declined to comment for this story.
Loría of Boxoffi ce Pro says those chains likely see
Movie Pass as competition to their own loyalty
programs, which were developed, at least to some
degree, because of the success of Movie Pass 1.0.
Spikes is undeterred. He says he’s hadCULTURE
$42.5
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billionAvengers:
Endgame