Many have said that MoviePass is a dying brand that is soon to be bankrupt. And apparently, given the most recent news, the subscriptions service’s parent company, Helios and Matheson, seems to think the same thing.
Helios and Matheson have announced its intention to take the MoviePass assets and spin them off into their own publicly traded company that would be only a subsidiary to the parent. Why would they do this? Well, depends on how you look at it, I suppose.
READ MORE: MoviePass Exec Gloats Paying Subscribers Are Only Using The Service 1 Time Per Month
Here’s what Helios and Matheson CEO Ted Farnsworth says about the move (via Deadline), “Since we acquired control of MoviePass in December 2017, [Helios and Matheson] largely has become synonymous with MoviePass in the public’s eye, leading us to believe that our shareholders and the market perception of [Helios and Matheson] might benefit from separating our movie-related assets from the rest of our company.”
That comment leads you to believe that the move to create a new company based around MoviePass is to help differentiate the subscription service brand from the parent company’s data analytics business. However, a more cynical look at the statement would tell a different story.
Over the last year, the controversial subscription service has gone from being the big disruptor that was going to change the filmgoing experience forever to becoming the butt of jokes, as the service reported multiple outages, reduced its benefits to almost nothing, and began hemorrhaging subscribers. As a result, Helios and Matheson has seen its stock drop from over $30 a share to right around $0.01 a share, with the threat of becoming delisted by NASDAQ a very real possibility.
What this potential split would do is cut loose the MoviePass brand, which also includes MoviePass Films (production company), MoviePass Ventures (financier), and MovieFone, into its own separate sinking ship. This way Helios and Matheson might have a fighting chance of survival based on its pre-existing data analytics business holdings.
“We believe this new vertically integrated entertainment ecosystem, if achieved, would provide a sharper market focus, and that the combination of these four business lines under the MoviePass Entertainment umbrella would produce substantial synergies that we believe will generate value for our shareholders, subscribers, and business partners,” Farnsworth said.
So, if you’re still a devotee (and I’m not exactly sure why you are, feel free to comment below), this latest news can’t be a good sign. While you still pay the monthly fee to watch around 1 film per month (based on the company’s own findings), the subscription service can’t even keep its most important subscriber — Helios and Matheson.