New MoviePass rules and changes you should know

Hollis Johnson/Business
Insider

Movie-theater subscription service MoviePass has made a bevy of
recent changes in an effort to stay afloat after a series of
setbacks.

The MoviePass app recently experienced an outage caused by the company temporarily
running out of money, and it borrowed $5 million to get it up
and running again. As MoviePass continues to struggle financially
— the stock has plummeted to below a
dollar — the changes it is implementing have been touted as a way
to remain sustainable for the future. 

But subscribers should be aware of these changes if they continue
to use the service, or are new to it.

Below are all the changes MoviePass will roll out, or has
already:

• MoviePass will increase its monthly plan from
  $9.95 a month to $14.95 a month within the next 30
  days. It lowered its price last year to $9.95, and has
  struggled to keep up with the surge of subscribers since, as
  MoviePass pays full ticket price for most films its users see.
• Big films with wide releases, such as “Christopher
  Robin,” “The Meg” and others for the foreseeable future, will
  not be available on the service for at least their first two
  weeks in theaters. Prior to confirming this, MoviePass
  restricted users from seeing “Mission: Impossible — Fallout,”
  prompting confusion during the movie’s opening weekend.
• In an email to customers this week, MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe
  said not all showtimes for every movie would be
  available, and the “service will vary from day to day.”
• The email also said that “access to customer support
  may be limited” as MoviePass works to improve it. The
  company is in the process of introducing more “self-help tools”
  and will “focus our resources on fixing glitches and bugs in the
  app.” MoviePass customer service has been a
  thorn in users’ sides, and it looks like it may get worse
  before it gets better.
• Surge pricing during popular showtimes is here to
  stay, which has been a topic of controversy. Customers have complained
  that prices surge even when a theater is nearly empty. But
  MoviePass told Business Insider that surge pricing is still in
  the testing phase, and it is “trialing different algorithms to
  fine-tune the feature.”
• For new subscribers, MoviePass currently offers
  two monthly plans: a basic plan at $7.95 a month for three
  films a month, and a “Plus” plan for $9.95 a month for a movie
  a day. You still can’t see films more than once in
  theaters, though.

For more of Business Insider’s MoviePass coverage,
click here.