Aw, the halcyon days of MoviePass. In the mid-to-late 2010s, the tech company aimed to disrupt everything we knew about paying a single movie ticket to see a single movie in a movie theater. Instead, they went for a streaming service-styled pricing package, offering in its heyday a scant $10 a month for one movie a day at just about any dang movie theater in your area. People — especially people who lived in cities where a single ticket costwaymore than $10 — flocked to it in giant numbers, seeing tons and tons of movies at this low, low price. Studios and exhibitors alike began disliking the company, but they didn’t need to getmuchrevenge. As their profitability kept shrinking, and their weird rules and shady business dealings kept increasing, they eventually folded in 2019. But their mark on the movie theater industry remains — without MoviePass, there’s no AMC A-List.
It’s a bonkers story of innovation, disruption, hubris, and financial instability. It’d make one heckuva documentary right? Speaking of which…
RELATED:MoviePass Is Officially Shutting Down, As of Tomorrow
Deadline reports that a documentary series about the surprising rise and colossal fall of MoviePass is in the works. The docuseries will hail from a team used to depicting American plays at disrupting (or, uh, scamming) capitalism-happy consumers: Unrealistic Ideas, the production company headed byMark Wahlberg, that brought us the HBO docuseriesMcMillions. This series will be based onJasonGuerrasio’sreporting on the company for Insider, and will, surprisingly, feature first-hand accounts from MoviePass foundersStacy SpikesandHamet Watt. As producerArchie Gipsput it, “There’s only one way to tell the unabridged story of MoviePass properly, and that’s through the eyes of Stacy and Hamet, the innovators who conceived it. They built it from nothing, and then were told their services were no longer needed.”
The producers, which beyond Wahlberg and Gips also includeStephen Levinson,Jack Heller, andScott Veltri, went on to explain their creative vision for the series:
No title, network, or release dates have been announced yet, but once it’s out there, this will be squarely for documentary fans who need moreFyre Fraud-esque explorations of unique, contemporary failures.
KEEP READING:‘McMillions’ Review: Living in the Uneasy Territory Between the Comic and Tragic | Sundance 2020
