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MoviePass Now Blocking Users from Seeing Mission: Impossible 6
After a more than 24-hour outage, embattled subscription service MoviePass is now barring all users from seeing Mission: Impossible - Fallout. To say that MoviePass isn't having a good weekend would be a massive understatement. The service that began offering customers the ability to watch a 2D film every day for only a $9.95 monthly fee last summer is seemingly collapsing under the weight of subscriber demand, as Hollywood heads into the final stages of this year's blockbuster season.
On Thursday night, MoviePass' millions of subscribers were surprised and displeased to find out that they couldn't use the service to see any movie, unless they were one of the few who happen to live near a theater that MoviePass partners with to offer e-tickets. The next morning, it was revealed that MoviePass had literally run out of money, and couldn't pay for its subscribers tickets. Being that this was preview night for Mission: Impossible - Fallout, the social media vitriol flew wildly. By Friday night, MoviePass was up and running again, albeit with nearly every showing - even for movies that had been out for a month by that point - coming with a "peak pricing" surcharge.
Now, while MoviePass still technically claims to be working, its service has hit the skids once again. All of Saturday so far, users have been barred from purchasing a ticket for Mission: Impossible 6 with their MoviePass cards. Complaints about that on Twitter have been answered with a canned reply about Fallout being offered to MoviePass users "at some point" during its theatrical run. As if that wasn't bad enough, in the last hour or so, complaints have started to come in that the MoviePass app isn't allowing check-in to any movies at all, this time by completely removing listings for most theaters' movies. For its part, MoviePass is saying that they're having "technical issues," but not explaining anything beyond that, which isn't exactly calming down users.
While it remains a question when exactly MoviePass will let subscribers watch Mission: Impossible - Fallout, perhaps the bigger question is what all these problems mean for the service's future. There was much speculation during the Thursday/Friday outage that MoviePass was dead or dying, but when they resumed operations on Friday night, an upbeat statement from CEO Mitch Lowe suggested that things were back to normal, albeit with some changes to movie availability in the future. Users obviously didn't expect that said changes would entail immediately barring them from one of the biggest sequels of the summer, or screenings for other films just disappearing from the app without notice.
With that in mind, it would appear that Lowe's statement was made in spite of the fact that MoviePass is in very real danger of collapsing. Evidently the loan they received to get back in business wasn't nearly enough to sustain them for even the weekend, even without people going to see Fallout. It'll be interesting to see what kind of positive spin Lowe might try to put on things next time, assuming tonight's apparent outage is addressed officially. Presuming MoviePass resumes functioning properly tomorrow - minus Tom Cruise's latest hit - one wonders if this will be the case every weekend going forward. Will Christopher Robin be banned during opening weekend for MoviePass users? Will The Meg? Right now, users don't know, and they're not happy about it at all.
