MoviePass CEO says he’s received many offers to buy company

Mitch Lowe
(left)
Getty / Dave Kotinsky /
Stringer

• MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe told Cheddar he’d received
  many offers from “very big media companies” to acquire
  MoviePass.
• He wouldn’t say which companies, only that people
  “would recognize them.”
• He also said the company would be profitable in 6-9
  months, and that its cash burn had 
  been
  reduced by 60%.

After a week that has given MoviePass subscribers whiplash and
provoked confusion about the company’s future, CEO Mitch Lowe
seems optimistic about the months ahead — at least to the media.

This week, MoviePass announced significant changes,
and rollbacks to previous
controversial changes. The big news was that the
movie-theater subscription service will now limit the number of
films subscribers can see to three per month (instead of one per
day). And the new plan also rolled back the unpopular surge
“peak” pricing, brought back big films like “Mission Impossible”
that MoviePass had recently banned, and kept the price at $9.95 a
month rather than raising it to $14.95 a month.

Lowe sat down with Cheddar on Wednesday to discuss the changes
and how the service could bounce back. 

Lowe said he’d received offers to
acquire MoviePass from “very big media companies that
understand the value that we’re
generating.” He
wouldn’t name which ones, though, only saying, “You would
recognize them.”

“It’s attractive and interesting,
but I’m focused on driving the business and
repair
ing all these things
that have not worked so well for the customer,” he added.

Lowe also said he had a “great
partnership” with Helios and Matheson Analytics, the company that
took a majority stake in MoviePass last August (now up to 92%),
and was instrumental in dropping its price and raising funds to
cover the service’s losses by issuing new shares to the
public. 

“They’re great partners, they’ve
been there all day, they’ve invested hundreds of millions of
dollars into MoviePass and I know they’ll always be there for
us,” Lowe said.

Lowe said 15% of subscribers had already converted to the new
plan. He said MoviePass wouldn’t become profitable for another
six-to-nine months, but claimed changes had reduced the burn rate
by 60%.

“The change of the model to three films will get our burn to
zero very quickly,” Lowe said.

In filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Helios
and Matheson estimated its cash burn due to MoviePass at $45
million for both June and July. On Wednesday, Helios and Matheson
stock was trading at $0.07 per share.