![]() Losing money is never a good look, but when you're growing, it's going to attract some suitors. There's also the possibility that MoviePass itself gets taken out. Moviefone came cheap at just $28 million, or a little more than a quarter of what Helios and Matheson raised in its secondary offering two months ago. As MoviePass grows, it won't be a surprise to find it gobbling up other properties where it can attract and retain potential new subscribers. It may be years since you last thought of the original service that provided audio movie times by phone, but it remains a vibrant entertainment platform, with 6 million monthly unique visitors. Three days after I became an investor, Helios and Matheson announced the acquisition of Moviefone. ![]() ![]() MoviePass has also talked about cashing in on the data it's collecting, something that may not be worth enough to subsidize the model (and is a taboo subject these days ), but it's one more arrow in its monetization quiver. It's negotiating and renegotiating deals with exhibitors. MoviePass is already acting like a big fish. We've seen pricing revolutions happen when a disruptor upends a model, and that's just what we're seeing here. The bigger it gets, the harder it will be to ignore. When the country's largest multiplex operator failed to play along, MoviePass responded by booting its 10 business multiplexes from the system. Smaller chains are already playing nice with MoviePass, giving them cheaper tickets and/or a cut of the high-margin concessions. That's a lot of money for a company to lose, and the reason why Wall Street is souring on the business model and the stock. Then you're going to multiply 5 million MoviePass members by $9.95 a month - knowing that many pay even less than that - and arrive at less than $600 million in subscription revenue. You're going to pull up the more than $11 billion in box office receipts generated at stateside theaters last year, and jot down that 20% of that would be more than $2.2 billion. The inner bear in you is going to snicker. He sees MoviePass going from 2 million members accounting for 6% of the domestic ticket sales to 5 million members gobbling up 20% of all movie tickets by the end of this year. MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe was at an entertainment finance forum last month, putting out some pretty bold near-term predictions. I'm fine with that.ĭon't underestimate the power of a growing audience. ![]() I'm not a fan of dilution, but the stock would have to double from current levels for those investors to be made whole. It priced units at $5.50, including warrants exercisable at $6.50. Helios and Matheson completed a $105 million secondary offering in February. ![]() The company is worth more than it was the last time that we were at these levels. Helios and Matheson closed at $2.79 the day before it announced the MoviePass deal. The stock also initially spiked - a more-than-tenfold gain by the time it peaked at $38.86 in mid-October - only to give it all back. MoviePass had just 20,000 accounts at the time of the deal, and back in February it was up to 2 million members. More importantly, the transaction accompanied the announcement that the service would be slashing its monthly subscription rate from as high as $30 to just $9.95. Helios and Matheson turned heads over the summer, acquiring a controlling stake in the fledgling MoviePass service that lets members watch movies at the local multiplex - no more than one per day - for a single monthly price. ![]()
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