Written by Noah Turner<\/p>\n
MoviePass<\/a> is a monthly subscription service that launched in 2011 with the mission to fill movie theater seats. When a new customer signs up for the service, they receive a debit card in the mail. When they get in range of a participating theater, they enter the ticket information, and MoviePass puts a balance on the debit card to pay for the ticket.<\/p>\n The service launched nationwide in October 2012 with prices varying from $20-$45 a month, depending on location. Around the summer of 2016, MoviePass announced the new membership rate of $9.95 to see a movie every day for 30 days. The service grew from around 20,000 members to 1.5 million by the first week of 2018. According to the Box Office Mojo<\/a>, 2017 had the lowest movie ticket sales since 1992. MoviePass believes they are the answer to this problem.<\/p>\n Junior Samuel Young signed up for MoviePass at the end of May 2018. Young reported using the service more than twice a week after he first subscribe but not using it much after the first month or so.<\/p>\n \u201cIt made more sense when they changed their policies because I did not understand how they were making any money with all these people using [Moviepass]\u201d Young said.<\/p>\n Young felt the service was still worth it, even after policy changes, and believed it was a worthy investment outside of Searcy.<\/p>\n \u201cI actually canceled my membership before coming back to Harding because I don\u2019t see as many movies when I am here, and The Rave theater in Little Rock has $5 tickets for students\u201d Young said.<\/p>\n Young said he would renew his subscription next summer if the service is still available, but due to the fact that the Searcy Cinema 8 does not accept MoviePass and there are affordable alternatives in Little Rock, he said the service would not be worth the price while at Harding.<\/p>\n But the future of MoviePass is uncertain. On Aug. 6 MoviePass announced a new policy that would limit subscribers to three movies a month for $9.95, with a $5 discount for additional movie tickets. MoviePass says this should only affect 15 percent of their customers who see four or more movies a month, as 85 percent of customers only use the service around three times a month, according to BusinessWire.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n Senior Hannah Reed found the change not to be surprising.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I first got it I said, \u2018Wow this seems too good to be true,\u2019 and it was. But $10 a month for a movie-goer that is going to go at least four times a month is an awesome deal. I knew it was going to be short-lived, but I wanted to ride that ride,\u201d Reed said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Written by Noah Turner MoviePass is a monthly subscription service that launched in 2011 with the mission to fill movie theater seats. When a new customer signs up for the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15086,"featured_media":11113,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[136],"tags":[173,204],"class_list":["post-11109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lifestyle","tag-harding-university","tag-moviepass"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15086"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11109"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11112,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11109\/revisions\/11112"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}