MOVIEPASS, MOVIECRASH Debuts May 29 On MAX

The HBO Original documentary MOVIEPASS, MOVIECRASH, directed by award-winning filmmaker Muta’Ali (HBO’s “Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn”), is streaming now on MAX. For Movie Geeks, it was the greatest thing to own and you could see your favorite films an unseemly amount of times. But there’s more to the story.

MoviePass was a movie lover’s dream, offering access to movie theater tickets at a discounted monthly subscription rate. In 2017, with a “too good to be true” promotional deal of $9.95 a month, subscriptions exploded, the company’s stock soared, and investors rushed to get in on the venture. However, the co-founders, who had built the pop culture phenomenon from scratch, were cast aside and forced to watch from the sidelines as new executives seized control.

In a span of eight years, MoviePass went from being the fastest growing subscription service since Spotify to total bankruptcy, losing over $150 million in 2017 alone. MOVIEPASS, MOVIECRASH chronicles the company’s beginnings as an innovative movie ticketing model beloved by cinema goers, exploring the visionary mission of its entrepreneur co-founders, its impressive early successes, and its precipitous downfall caused by mismanagement and corporate greed. 

A combination of extravagant and fraudulent spending with lavish parties at the Sundance Film Festival, Coachella, and the Cannes Film Festival, and a fundamentally unsustainable business model, led the company to shutter abruptly in 2019. 

Featuring exclusive interviews from the company’s co-founders, former CEO Mitch Lowe, former employees, investors, subscribers, industry analysts, and the journalists at Business Insider who originally reported on the rise and fall of the company, MOVIEPASS, MOVIECRASH uncovers the outrageous story behind the bold innovators who tried to disrupt the cinema-going paradigm and the key players who, in peddling a false narrative and seeking to fly too high, created a wild ride that ended with hundreds of millions of dollars in lost value and the early demise of the now infamous company. 

The documentary features interviews with Stacy Spikes; Hamet Watt; MoviePass board member Chris Kelly; former CEO of MoviePass Mitch Lowe; Business Insider journalists Nathan McAlone and Jason Guerrasio; former director at the Federal Trade Commission Daniel Kaufman; financial analysts; retail investors; and former MoviePass employees and subscribers.

The score is by Max Aruj.