As far as my experience goes, the "take a photo of your ticket stub" hassle ended the day of the price rollback announcement.
Sounds stupid, but I miss the days when the Crown Club automatically awarded you popcorn, drink or free ticket. I know we now have many more options, but I've become "point greedy" and never want to spend them. I'm like Smaug - just sleeping on my hundreds of thousands of CC points and never do anything with them!
My wife has been getting so many AMC Stubs points that I usually get into films free with her when I'm home. It's a bright red "MoviePass" branded Visa card (I believe), and unless you're handing it to someone at the box office, there is no way to tell it from any other card.
Slashfilm called out AMC for acting like a "petulant child" in their fight against MoviePass: AMC Theatres MoviePass Restrictions Are Childish and Pointless It's absolutely baffling "Stop giving us free money!" Like I thought, AMC had tried, and failed, to create their own "unlimited" movie club, and are miffed that MoviePass has managed it: In Deadline’s recent report on the newly revealed yearly subscription plan that MoviePass is offering for a limited time, they offered up this nugget of information: “AMC Theatres reportedly shopped around their version of a monthly ticket price plan to the major studios, which Deadline heard was met with a cold response.” And there it is. Now this all makes perfect sense. AMC Theatres wasn’t against the idea of MoviePass. Instead, AMC Theatres was upset that MoviePass was able to succeed where they had failed. The reason AMC Theatres couldn’t get their own subscription plan to work (something we suggested they should do if they hated MoviePass so much), is because studios were leery about renegotiating how much money they would get from any ticket sales tied to the potential subscription plan. MoviePass doesn’t have that problem, because they’re paying full price for tickets. So now AMC Theatres is retaliating by making the movie-going experience for MoviePass customers downright inconvenient. Also, AMC... ...has been more passive aggressive about their attempts at creating MoviePass restrictions. Since AMC Theatres can’t stop customers from paying with MoviePass, instead they’re punishing those customers by not allowing them to earn points on their Stubs or Stubs Premiere card for their ticket purchases made with a MoviePass card. It’s basically the movie theater chain equivalent of, “Fine, you can play in our sandbox, but you can’t use our bucket.” Give me a break. Other AMC Theatres have been more bold (or maybe they’ve misunderstood how they’re supposed to handle MoviePass customers). At least one AMC Theatres location in Illinois stopped customers from buying a ticket with MoviePass altogether, saying that they don’t accept the card. I know this because my twentysomething cousin was turned away from this location on several occasions until he eventually decided to go elsewhere. This is just an industrial-size bucket of dumb. If I were an AMC shareholder, I could be questioning the sanity of the current AMC board, and demanding the resignation of CEO Adam Aron. From his Wikipedia article: Aron was named CEO of AMC movie theaters in late 2015. Aron was the subject of a number of high profile pieces in magazines such as Variety that lauded him and his transformation strategy at AMC. [10] However, Aron's strategy has ultimately lead to a massive destruction of share holder value as AMC has been one of the worst performing stocks in the S&P since he took over as CEO. [11] Despite the company's performance during his tenure as CEO, Aron still collected over $10 million in annual compensation in 2016. [12] This is roughly 500x more than what the average employee at AMC makes. [13] [Bolding mine]
MoviePass Users Surge, but Theaters Remain Skeptical MoviePass Adds a Million Subscribers, Even if Theaters Aren’t Sold on It
I love MoviePass. I just hope it can survive! I've seen 24 movies theatrically with mp since I got it on Sept. 15th. At my local movie ticket prices that was c. $180 worth of tickets, for which I paid $35. That is a nutshell is why this is so wonderful for movie fans. But that's also why it's going to be a trick to make this work for movie fans. Per month, right now so far I'm averaging about $50 worth of movie tickets for $10. Apparently the average customer is costing them c. $27 or so a month.
Can't believe I'm just learning about this. I have read that they don't have a family plan yet. Do any of you guys with families have moviepass?
Since I last posted on this thread, I received my own Moviepass account as a gift from a customer (I had built him three home theaters.) I've been using it quite a bit, although nowhere near as much as my wife. We were planning another movie outing, but one of our favorite theaters had disappeared from the app. I did a bit of searching, and found out why: MoviePass Withdraws From High-Traffic AMC Theaters Moviepass, it turns out, is playing a bit of hardball with AMC, who has been very negative about Moviepass. They pulled 10 top AMC theaters from their service. They are: AMC Century City 15 in Los Angeles AMC Mercado 20 in Santa Clara, Calif. AMC Disney Springs 24 in Orlando, Fl. AMC Loews Boston Common 19 in Boston AMC River East 21 in Chicago AMC Mission Valley 20 in San Diego AMC Tysons Corner 16 in McLean, Va.; AMC Veterans 24 in Tampa AMC Loews Alderwood Mall 16 in Lynwood, Wash. This sucks because River East 21 shows some films that none of their theaters do. Presumably the drop in ticket sales will demonstrate to AMC management that a significant number of their regular customers are also Moviepass subscribers.
Yup, their strategy is starting to make sense to me, as this article points out: http://www.vulture.com/2018/02/whats-behind-moviepasss-latest-power-moves.html
My wife. I haven't been asked, which can only mean one thing... ...I need to see a lot more movies. It looks like they turn that on when you are seeing a much larger than average number of films per week.
Got an email today that I need to take a picture of my theatre receipt with every purchase going forward and email it to them. If I don't (more than one time), my service will be canceled and I'll be unable to re-subscribe...
I was on the picture brigade for about 3 months, and then I went to the movies less and they stopped asking. It's a minor annoyance, IMO, but considering the money saved, I did it without major complaint. One time I simply forgot. I threw the stub away, but I called them and they were good with it.
They're mainly concerned that you are actually buying movie tickets with the card, and not anything else. By the way, AMC's River East 21 in Chicago is back in the system. They've either reached an agreement with AMC or they believe they've proved their point. One other thing - my wife has been using her MoviePass with her Stubs card via AMC's kiosk with no problems. In fact, they frequently offer extra "points" for seeing a particular folks on a particular day - and she'll use MoviePass for those. She's really racking up the points.
They've yet to hit the existing subscribers with this change ... although it has seemed inevitable since the price drop.
I'm pretty sure those of us who are current members are going to be able to continue seeing one movie a day for the next year at least. CostCo wouldn't have sold a year's subscription to MoviePass to their members with one set of terms and then have it changed only a few months in.
Another change today: seeing the same movie more than once is no longer allowed. As far as I can tell, applies to existing members too.
I just had to update, and every movie that I've already seen says either "You can only see this movie one time" or "You've already seen this movie." It's not clear why some theaters say one thing and some the other.
