Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Moviepass, Moviecrash’ on Max, the story of a startup fiasco laced with systemic racism (2024)

Moviepass, Moviecrash (now on Max) has us recalling the good ol’ days of 2018, when millions of American moviegoers were living a too-good-to-be-true reality, paying 10 bucks a month to see pretty much as many movies at the theater as they wanted. Many of us took advantage of the insane Moviepass deal, knowing the math didn’t add up, but hey, we weren’t the ones courting financial disaster, right? Director Muta’Ali Muhammad’s HBO documentary relays the saga of a once-promising startup that crashed and burned spectacularly – and also turns up a story of racial disparity that enriches the film beyond merely recapping what we already knew via news headlines.

MOVIEPASS, MOVIECRASH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We meet a Moviepass superfan who still has his Moviepass t-shirt and debit card, relics of more halcyon days when he ventured to theaters to Avengers: Infinity War in 30-minute chunks just because he could. Another guy says he used Moviepass to see Crazy Rich Asians 14 times and, when asked why, he shrugs it off: it’s just a good romantic comedy. It worked like this: You paid your $9.95 monthly subscription fee, got a Moviepass debit card, and used it to see a movie as frequently as once a day. It was a completely independent venture that didn’t involve partnerships with theaters. The average price of a movie ticket at the time was $11. It doesn’t take advanced math to realize that this wasn’t a workable business model. So how the hell did Moviepass do it?

Well, let’s start at the beginning. Moviepass was 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 – you may begin cringing now – data analytics company Helios and Matheson (HMNY), run by Ted Farnsworth. HMNY bought a majority stake in Moviepass, and Lowe and Farnsworth implemented the $9.95 superdeal in order to reel in customers and boost the company’s stock value. It worked, of course: Hundreds of thousands of people signed up, crashing Movipass servers, and the stock price ballooned by more than 1,000 percent. Farnsworth got investors to pump millions into the business, promising a payoff once Moviepass sold user data and reached solvency. I can hear your thoughts now: This is surely totally sustainable and not at all illustrative of the predatory hucksterism of Wall Street scam artists!

Stokes and Watt weren’t so sure about all this, so Lowe and Farnsworth fired them from the company they founded. Why did Stokes and Watt bring these two lunatics into the fold to begin with? Well, Lowe had a good track record with his previous employers. And Stokes and Watt are people of color, while Lowe and Farnsworth are White guys; cue an expert talking head who states that a depressingly paltry one-to-three percent of all venture capital in America goes to businesses owned by women or minorities. So there’s your deeply troublesome dynamic, the subtext of this distinctly American story of failure.

Anyway, with the two smart, cautious guys out, Moviepass lost its collective mind. As the company hemorrhaged money, Lowe and Farnsworth were frequently on TV news-talk shows stating – read: lying about – how they were on track to being out of the red. But behind the scenes, they were changing the Moviepass terms of use on a near-daily basis in order to throttle the losses. The Moviepass app kept crashing, and the deal changed from one movie a day to three a month without warning, etc., and customer complaints piled up. At this point, we get commentary from Moviepass employees who were too few to adequate deal with the tech support and customer-service stuff, while Farnsworth and Lowe started a Moviepass movie-production company (their first venture? John Travolta gangster bio Gotti, which was ridiculed for being godawful), and spent a million bucks to helicopter Dennis Rodman and social media influencers to Coachella to throw a big fat promotional Moviepass party. Are you shaking your head at all this? Of course you are.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: There’s no shortage of doomed-startup/killed-by-greed documentaries, ranging from this to WeWork or The Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, Glitch: The Rise and Fall of HQ Trivia and Skandal! Bringing Down Wirecard.

Performance Worth Watching: You’ll love the juicy insider bits from former Moviepass office drones (one shares how screenshots of movie tickets were replaced with middle fingers when the company began screwing with customers) and fans sharing their joy of paying so little to see so many movies (although you’re free to groan in dismay at the woman who says she hasn’t been to a movie theater since Moviepass died).

Memorable Dialogue: These are great bits:

Moviepass employee: “They had spent over a million dollars (on the Coachella party), meanwhile, there weren’t any extension cords to plug our computers into. We had to go next door to borrow pens. It was insane.”

HMNY’s public relations guy: “The media was trying to grok the economics of all this. All they could see was an inherent loss in every transaction.”

Ted Farnsworth, totally lying: “Any movie, any theater, any day. That was me. That’s what I created.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: That Lowe, despite being under indictment for Moviepass-related fraud, agreed to sit down with director Muhammad is perhaps indicative of the cavalier can’t-touch-me attitude of rich White men. That’s pretty audacious of him, although his commentary isn’t particularly meaningful beyond the one unwitting class-warfare bit where he says “Not all roles get to party” on the company dime. Not surprisingly, he pushes most of the blame to Farnsworth (who does not participate in the documentary) and shrugs off the company’s fate as some bad decisions he wouldn’t make now. Sorry buddy, you’re still one of the villains here, while Stokes and Watt shake their heads at what could’ve been.

One of the not-particularly shocking shockers here? Stokes was let go from Moviepass with $80 million worth of stock options that he couldn’t cash out for 12 months, by which time they were worth next to nothing. (Somehow, he and Watt maintain level heads as they share stories of how they could only sit back and watch as Lowe and Farnsworth obliterated the company’s value; they needn’t worry about expressing outrage, because we can do it for them.) One of the somewhat shocking shockers? Stokes bought Moviepass at an auction and relaunched a more modest version of the business in 2023. Maybe the refurbed Moviepass will give a goose in the caboose to a theatrical exhibition biz that could really use it now; at its peak in 2018, Moviepass provided a significant boost to an industry that was already dwindling before the Covid pandemic and an emphasis on funneling movies to streaming outlets accelerated its decline. As we see should-be sure things like The Fall Guy and Furiosa struggle to sell tickets here in 2024, the sad subtext of Moviepass, Moviecrash reads, if this business hadn’t been plundered and exploited and mismanaged, could we be in a moviegoing renaissance?

More significant, though, is the infuriating story of systemic racism behind the Moviepass collapse; it gives the documentary depth beyond the basic rise-and-fall narrative. Two Black men start a company. They partner with two White men out of necessity to grow the company. The two White men destroy the company in a year. Why? Greed, self-indulgence and the pursuit of status. The optics are gruesome, and the substance even worse. Hooray for late capitalism!

Muhammad gives us the usual documentary format, with archival footage and talking heads; of course, journalists are among the latter, because they deep-dived into Moviepass’ financial records enough to result in Lowe and Farnsworth’s eventual indictment on securities and wire fraud (as of May, 2024, they’re still awaiting trial). But the director has a propensity for finding compelling voices and conducting a good interview, as Moviepass fans and employees provide colorful commentary that nudges the film from merely interesting to entertaining. He also lands some key interviews that give the narrative significant first-person agency. Stokes comes off as an earnest and intelligent guy who loves movies and wants to make a living working in the business – he surely hopes his participation in Moviepass, Moviecrash results in a follow-up short, Moviepass, Moviecrash, Movieriseagain. Maybe we should go sign up for his relaunch.

Our Call: Moviepass, Moviecrash goes deeper than pre-pandemic nostalgia to find yet another troublesome narrative about late-capitalism America. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.