#254. 'MoviePass, MovieCrash' (Max)
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Sonny, JVL, and Mike all land in the same place on the Max documentary MoviePass, MovieCrash: a genuinely wild business story told incompetently. Sonny walks through the actual MoviePass math (losing money on every ticket, betting on data sales and scale that never materialized) and complains the film buries that explanation until nearly the halfway mark, lumping it in with other "zero interest rate era" fraud docs like the WeWork and Fyre Festival films; Mike, coming to the saga relatively fresh, piles on about the cheap stock footage and a bait-and-switch structure that flashes back to founder Stacy Spikes's backstory instead of staying chronological; JVL is harshest of all, calling it flatly incompetent for letting Mitch Lowe sit for an interview without ever mentioning his pending criminal fraud indictment, glossing over Ted Farnsworth's post-MoviePass grifts, and never pressing on the show's real unanswered mystery — why hedge fund Hudson Bay Capital kept bankrolling Farnsworth through scheme after scheme. The first third is the usual grab-bag: JVL riffs on Iceland's world-leading per-capita movie attendance (and, he claims, correspondingly high teen pregnancy), Sonny tries to Letterboxd his way to a lifetime movie count, JVL raves about rewatching The Fall Guy on PVOD and gleefully reports that its movie-within-a-movie is based on a real 1983 schlock film called Metal Storm: The Destruction of Jared Syn, and Sonny delivers a long, aggrieved report on multiple Dallas-area and Minnesota Alamo Drafthouse franchise locations abruptly filing for bankruptcy and shutting down, spinning into a broader detour on AMC A-List economics versus Alamo's season pass and studio/theater revenue splits. There's also a grim box-office check-in (Garfield atop a historically weak weekend) and chatter about Deadpool & Wolverine, Twisters, and Zachary Levi's Harold and the Purple Crayon promo tour taking an unexpected RFK Jr. turn. Mike closes with an unrelated coda about running a Little League water-balloon derby at practice.
From the show notes
Not a good documentary, but one that inspired some good discussion.
Full transcript
Guest00:00:00- Moviepass, a subscription service, the Netflix for the movie theater. - It was the greatest thing ever. - MoviePass. - MoviePass. - MoviePass. - The popular movie ticket app. - MoviePass, we remember them. Whatever happened to those guys? - We thought this could reinvigorate the movie-going business. - Any movie, any theater, any day.
Vic00:00:22- I went to the movie theater 428 times.
Guest00:00:25- MoviePass doubled the revenue in theaters. - We were worth $80 million plus. - We had a product that no one could stop.
Mike00:00:41- Welcome to the Sub-Beacon Podcast. I am your co-host, Mike Warren. Joining me, as always, are my two co-hosts who saw about 428 movies last year. Jonathan V. Last and Sonny Bunch. Join us over at subbeacon.com. Become a patron. Tell your friends and family. Comment. Get new episodes every Friday, but you can only do that at subbeacon.com. We'll be talking about MoviePass, Movie Crash later in the show. But first, let's see how everyone's doing. JVL, what's going on with you, my man?
JVL00:01:18- I don't know if this is still true, but 15 years ago, the country in the world with the most frequent movie attendance, so the highest average number of movies seen per year was Iceland. And once you think about it for five seconds, it makes total sense.
Mike00:01:38- What else are you gonna do?
JVL00:01:39- Right? There's nothing else to do. It's small. They all speak a whole bunch of languages, so they can watch any language film. And I believe the national, when I looked at this, again, it was about 15 years ago, I believe the national average consumption was like 90 movies a year.
Sonny00:01:57In theaters. - That's a lot of movies. That's a lot of movies in theaters.
JVL00:01:59- That's like 1.8 movies per week or something like that. - Yeah. - Which is wild.
Sonny00:02:05- That's probably about... - What you see.
JVL00:02:09It's probably close to what you see.
Sonny00:02:10- Yeah, I mean, that's, I probably see in theaters... I probably see in theaters about two a week, which is about, about a hundred and, what, 104.
JVL00:02:20- Yeah, they also had very high levels of teen pregnancy. Again, once you think about it for five seconds, makes total sense.
Guest00:02:25- Makes a lot of sense.
Mike00:02:27- Since you took us down this road, JVL, real quickly, Sonny, I was wondering, actually, how many movies do you think you have seen in your entire life?
Sonny00:02:39- Oh, I don't know about that. - You don't have a number for it? - I wouldn't have any idea. - Okay. - Like, how many, how many, how many individual, disparate, distinct titles have I seen, do you mean? - Unique users, correct. - Or how many, how many movies? - Totally unique users.
Mike00:02:55- You could do, you could come up with a ballpark on this pretty easily.
JVL00:02:57- Maybe, maybe not now. - You probably see a hundred 120 movies, different movies per year, right?
Sonny00:03:05- I could, I could look, why don't you guys talk for a little bit? Let me, let me look at my Letterboxd account.
JVL00:03:11- So you do that, 'cause I have something I want to talk about. - Go ahead, Jacob. - I want to talk about Fall Guy, 'cause I saw Fall Guy again, because it's already streaming.
Mike00:03:19- Yes, yes it is. - You can go out
JVL00:03:21and watch Fall Guy for streaming, and I would like to issue a correction to our Fall Guy episode. It's better than I thought. - - I loved it, and it's actually even better on second viewing, and it's funnier, and everything about it is great, and I learned something that I never knew before.
Mike00:03:44I'll wait for you to put your soda down, Mike,
JVL00:03:45I don't want you to spit all over your computer. - Oh, whew, it's close. - Metal Storm, the movie within the movie. - Yes. - Is, like the Fall Guy, a loosely based remake of a real thing. - What? - Metal Storm - The destruction of, hold on, let me get, Metal Storm: The Destruction of Jared Sin is a 1983 sci-fi movie in which a space cowboy, I'm sorry, a space ranger is gallivanting about seeking to, there's a tribe of mutants and a bad guy, and Kelly Preston is in it, a very, very young Kelly Preston, and as God is my witness, when you look at the one sheet for it, the tagline for this movie is, "It's high noon at the end of the universe." And so this schlock sci-fi movie has been reimagined inside the Fall Guy as a romantic adventure in a movie which has taken a schlocky TV series that was a Murder of the Week show and reinvented it as a romantic action movie. And I just find that delightful. So it's working on so many levels. It's working on all the levels for me. That's all I have. It's great. If you haven't seen it for some reason...
Sonny00:05:14That's funny. I had no idea. I had no... I didn't realize that it was... Because it seems, in the context of the movie, it seems to be very much riffing on Dune, but also, like, Aquaman and...
JVL00:05:28It's really riffing on the actual metal. The actual metal storm set in a desert. The first metal storm. It's like... The set of it is the desert. Everything about this is... It's hilarious. But they took it and they, you know... And it fits, right? Of course. Somebody would greenlight Jodie's version of that movie because it's existing IP, even though it's bad IP, just like the fall guy. Right. Gets greenlit because it's ex... Anyway, great.
Mike00:05:52I wonder, does it exist in-universe? Does the original movie exist in the universe of the fall guy? It must. All these other movies exist in-universe. But the fall guy, the fall guy the TV show does not exist in their universe. I mean, how do we know? Do we know? I don't know. How do we even know? Who could have predicted this movie would have, you know, generate such controversy and conversation?
Sonny00:06:18Charlie Kaufman-esque.
JVL00:06:20High noon at the edge of the universe.
Mike00:06:24Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich. All right. Well, thank you JVL. For that. I got that little update Sonny. What so I have a question JBL.
Sonny00:06:33I have a question. Did you actually pay the POV PVOD price to 20 bucks?
JVL00:06:40I got to like see a movie in my house with my wife almost like a date because we can never actually go out to see movies together and it was 20 bucks and I already knew that the movie would would be great and will be a hit and I didn't pay to see it the first time because I have the AMC Stubs thing. It's like, you know, tickets are free, right? I have the a-list. Yeah.
Sonny00:07:04So like, you know, I got I got I have questions about a list because I'm going to I'm going to have to become an a-list member here.
JVL00:07:11Oh, yeah, because of Alamo.
Mike00:07:15Tell us something. Do you want do you want to pour your heart out here?
Sonny00:07:18No, no, I've just been googling nooses because it's no the the the so the Alamo draft house. Some folks know some folks don't know the Alamo draft house is kind of split. They have corporate draft houses and that's most of the ones in Austin. I think the New York ones the LA ones San Francisco. I think corporate owns corporate owns most of the biggest best shocking biggest best-performing. How about Northern Virginia? The Northern Virginia ones are franchised. Oh Northern Virginia are franchised. The the Dallas Fort Worth area ones are franchised. They're not all the same franchise. They have different. They have different franchise owners, but the the ones in Dallas Fort Worth and also a random one in Minnesota are owned by one group of one franchise group and they announced today kind of out of the blue that all of the DFW and their one Minnesota locations are going to be shutting down effective immediately. It that includes the one that's like four minutes from my house, which is which is bad news for me and bad news for me. I mean bad news for the industry bad news. Is for whatever I will say. I'm not shocked by this. I whenever I went to the my local Alamo Drafthouse. It was never crowded almost. I mean on the weekends or with a kid's movie, it would be more crowded but I would say it was not, you know, with the exception of the Barbenheimer Phenomenon last summer. The sellouts were rare. It is not. It is not, you know, I blame for the sunny. I blame a lot. Well, who do you blame? I blame America. I America has failed us.
JVL00:09:01The people don't deserve if they can't support the Alamo Drafthouse, then the people don't deserve a theater experience. They deserve the fucking AMC.
Sonny00:09:11Well, that's what we're going to get all the animals.
JVL00:09:13The animals just deserve that. You might as well like show it on a sheet, right? Tape a tape of an old ratty sheet up between a couple of trees and project your iPhone onto it because that's the same as going to an AMC and if you people can't support an Alamo Drafthouse, that's your fault. Not the Alamo Drafthouses fault because that place is too good.
Mike00:09:36Hey Sonny, which was your favorite of the Alamo's that you would see movies at in Dallas?
Sonny00:09:45I mean, I went to the Lake Highlands one all the time because that's where I lived. I mean, it was that was just like it was super convenient. The Cedars one is I mean, they're there.
Mike00:09:54I've been to the Cedars one.
Sonny00:09:55So the Cedars one is nice. I like the Cedars one. And it had the Cedars one probably has the best bar area. Yes, so the Richardson bar area is pretty nice too. I'd never been to the Denton or Las Colinas locations. Those are kind of far away. But the but but the I again I would say 90% of my trips were to Lake Highlands. Sometimes I would go to Cedars or Richardson because they play sometimes would play slightly different movies or it's slightly different show times.
JVL00:10:20You were going to love the AMC.
Sonny00:10:22Well, I have questions about the the A-list. I would rather I would rather I would actually rather hang myself then go to a regular regal is the worst. It's not not even if I would just like I would just quit on life.
JVL00:10:39I have I have in the past refused to go see a movie because the only option was the regal.
Sonny00:10:44I have I have not gone that far. There are have been movies there's so it's funny. The regal is actually the closest movie theater to me. Now the regal the regal is there is a regal. There's a regal United artists. Location that's that's I think closer to me than the AMC by about by two or three minutes and I've been there. I've been there twice. I've been there twice both times. I was the only person in the movie theater. I have no idea how this location stays in business. It is empty all the time. But again, I go at weird times. So, you know, I'm not I should you shouldn't take my right experiences, but you know, I went to like a I went to like a Friday morning 11:00 a.m. Screening of smile there I think because it was like the it was the only time that fit in with my schedule to see smile and it was I mean, it was literally the most depressing movie theater. I've ever walked into but I know it's it's bad. It's bad all around for movie theaters in the Dallas area. We also have Angelica's Angelica's are like Indy chains. They do some more art house stuff, but they also do regular, you know, standard mainstream fare and there were there were two locations. The Plano location shut down like three days ago June June 3rd. It just it. It had been the Plano the Plano Angelica which make it to summer the Plano Angelica, which had been in operation for 20 years was was a foundational corners location of like the Legacy shopping center or whatever. It was called whatever it's called in Plano night shopping center. I used to have to hang out there when my kid was doing summer dust camps in Plano, but the but the but the the Plano location shut down again had been open for 20 years. I don't think the Mockingbird location frankly is long for this world judging by again. I go there fairly regularly because I have a I have a VIP card from Angelica, which gets me free entry. So I would I would go there sometimes but the but that location is always is never particularly crowded again. I have a hard time judging these things because I go at weird times to be the I am going at off-peak hours frequently. I do not necessarily I do not necessarily represent the mean moviegoer in my habits. So the anyway, the long and the short of it is the long and the short of it is I I am I am like soup. So the draft house is interesting because I can I can we talk a little is are people going to be bored if I if I talk the details of why they declared bankruptcy.
JVL00:13:23Should I say that with that with that this all mood this whole episode is about the business of movies.
Sonny00:13:28Yeah. So if people don't want it there, I'm sorry if you don't want to talk about the business of movie tickets. This is a not a good episode for you. We'll be back next week with something I will should we do the original bad boys next week? Michael Bay. We should do bad boys too, which is like the most incredibly amazingly it's the most Michael Bay movie. I think even more so than the Transformers movies. Anyway, we can discuss afterward. Anyway. All right. So the the in the chapter 7 bankruptcy filing the the local franchisee laid out the following points which I think are all are all are all
JVL00:14:04a like any one of them in this place went bankrupt 180 minutes ago and you've already read through the bankruptcy filing.
Sonny00:14:11Well, I've read through. Oh, I've read through the summary but the totally normal, but only normal guys. I read. No, I read that. I read the story at Dallas culture map. I didn't I didn't go through the bankruptcy filing.
JVL00:14:24Oh, you didn't go into Pacer and pull them.
Sonny00:14:27No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's okay. No, no Dallas culture map. All right. So here here are the four main points that that Dallas culture map lists and I think that these are all any of these in isolation would be enough to kill a theater franchise of this sort. But so here's point number one industry-wide guest counts have not rebounded even to pre covid levels and coupled with the hundred plus days of writers and actress strikes industry-wide economic performance was severely down. In the fourth quarter of 2023 in the first quarter of 2024 the first quarter of 2024 has been the worst performing quarter in movie going history accurate. I mean that that's just that's just objectively true. There hasn't been there hasn't been nearly enough product in movie theaters and the product that has been there has been questionable and like that that you know that kills you that kills you. People just don't want to go to movies right now that that that's that's a big problem. All right. Number two as a franchisee they paid franchise fees not required of other competitors payments of these fees to our franchisor in a prolonged environment of significantly decreased revenues was not sustainable. Franchise fees alone were nearly 10 percent of sales three point seven million dollars in 2023. That's wild. I like I look at this and I say to myself what the fuck is Alamo corporate doing by not giving them a pass on this. Now I know what Alamo corporate is doing. Trying to stay afloat. Alamo corporate is also trying to stay afloat. They they do not want to lose that revenue. They can't afford to lose that revenue. They are in bankruptcy themselves. They are in a reorganizational bankruptcy and they are trying to get sold to somebody else.
Mike00:16:10So that's bad.
JVL00:16:11So that's that does not bode well for corporate does not that does not bode well for anyone.
Sonny00:16:16All right. Here's the third point. Due to contractual obligations they were forced to keep open even the most unprofitable locations open. They were forced to keep those open even to the detriment of the overall business, which again, like I understand why Alamo doesn't want to let them start closing locations because that projects weakness, blah, blah, blah. I don't know that that would necessarily project more weakness than what happened. And the other I mean, the other thing is even this this still would have killed me because I am almost certain the Lake Highlands location where I was was one of the worst performing of the five or six that these guys ran. Maybe maybe the second worst performing. But it was it was routinely just again, not full, not not not a busy place. To see movies. And then the third, the fourth point was the family had the family that owns it had put in, you know, three, three and a half million dollars into the company had put in another million dollars trying trying to keep things afloat and they just pulled the plug. They were like, we can't we can't keep pouring money can't keep pouring good money after bad. Again, I don't blame them for any of this. It sucks. I do I I there are people I do blame the strikes did not help anything. And, you know, the decision to move up the VOD window has not helped a lot of things. And the rise of streaming has not helped anyone. But the whole thing is just super depressing. It's super depressing. I am hoping that Alamo corporate steps in and keeps at least one or two of these locations in Dallas open. But we'll see. We'll see what happens.
Mike00:17:51Wild. So that's what's going on in your world.
Sonny00:17:55That's. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry to bother people with my movie theater problems, but I am it's not as you're going through it. You're going through it. I'm going through it.
JVL00:18:07I'm going through it. So when are you going to join the A-List?
Sonny00:18:09Well, so this is my question, JBL. So my understanding with A-List, my understanding is that A-List is actually a much better deal than season pass because you you don't pay the service fees with with the season pass at Drafthouse. I had to pay a two dollar service. Correct. Which is very annoying. I am like I was always vaguely put off by that anyway. But my understanding is AMC A-List, you don't have to pay that service fee and you also get access to IMAX and Dolby.
JVL00:18:38Is that right? Correct.
Sonny00:18:40Correct. No restrictions at all. There's no restrictions at all. Now, are there ever times? Are there ever like blackout days or dates? Zero. So there's no there's no and there's no like upcharge for Dolby or IMAX.
JVL00:18:50None. What is the catch then? There is no catch.
Sonny00:18:56No. So it's just a better deal all around. It's just a better deal. The catch is the catch is you have to see movies with AMC audiences.
JVL00:19:01The catch is that you have to see movies in AMC theaters on incredibly dim screens that may have some minor tears in them with 40 year old projector bulbs and AMC audiences who may or may not be watching other movies on their iPads or phones during your movie. And. Meaning between shows is perfunctory at best. Yeah. At best. Other than that, other than that, though, I mean, it's just a tremendous deal. And I will say, I suspect that they can do this just because of popcorn, right? Like that. Yeah. They're they're just like, they don't care. It doesn't cost them anything to get you in. That's the real question. I've never understood is how are theaters being compensated for AMC stubs? We're whatever tickets bought because I bet you, how are the studios? Right. That the studios are not getting half of a ticket price.
Sonny00:20:05My understanding. So so it's funny. I talked to I talked to the head of the National Association for Theater of Theater Owners, NATO, the head of NATO. I talked to the head of NATO, movie theater, NATO, not strategic defense.
Mike00:20:19Can you make sure all the members are paying their fair share?
Sonny00:20:23And and and so this was this was a thing. I questioned him about and he got very antsy. He got very like, well, you know, it's a formula and certain movies and they all work out their own deals. We don't really do that here at NATO. And I was like, OK, so you're not going to tell me he's like, no, no. But but my understanding is my understanding. So look, we're going to talk about this more in a minute with the MoviePass documentary. But my understanding is if you have a ten dollar movie ticket, roughly speaking, you're you're looking at a 50 percent share to the studios and a 50 percent share to the theater. It's actually not quite that, but it's for our purposes, it's fine. And so my understanding is that when you buy a ticket with a list or season pass or something like that, the studio doesn't get the full 50 percent. It's some slightly lesser amount, I think. But it's. It's not it's not entirely clear, and I think it depends on the the it depends on the theater chain and it depends on the studio and it depends on the release, frankly. Like I think I think there's also a breakdown of like if a new Marvel release gets a higher
JVL00:21:41percentage than a new, I don't know, new one, but you know, I mean, frankly, that's as it should be, because I mean, what you want to do if you are any of these parties, whether the studios or the movie theater is you want price elasticity, you want because it doesn't your marginal cost of showing the movie is zero, right? So you've got a showing you want to put people as many people in that theater as possible and you want to charge them all the way down to the least amount that they're willing to pay so that you can then get them to buy popcorn and popcorn and candy and sodas while there. Well, of course, they should be doing these things where they're practicing price discrimination and giving people who are price sensitive, bigger, bigger, you know, bigger ways to to
Sonny00:22:35theaters have always done this, right? Yeah. So theaters have always done this, right? This is this is what Tuesday this is what matinees are. This is what senior discounts are. This is what children's discounts are. Theaters have always had a good sense of this. And you know, you get into people who are like, well, you got to do surge pricing, you got to blah, blah, blah. And like, OK, but like theaters already do kind of a very basic version of that. The other the other big difference, again, is like the revenue split, right? So there was. So remember when Tenet came out in summer or I guess the fall of 2020, Tenet comes out. It's the first big release post or in the middle of the pandemic still because we don't have. So like it comes out in the middle of the pandemic or toward the tail end of the pandemic. And the the studios were the Warner Brothers basically said, if you want this movie, you have to give us 75 percent of every ticket or something like that. It was it was an insanely it was a it was a Disney Star Wars Marvel esque number. It was a huge, huge number. And the theaters were all super pissed about it. But none of them had a choice because this is what this was it that they they had to
JVL00:23:47have a movie that was going to open to twenty two million dollars.
Sonny00:23:50They had to have they had to have a movie and they had to have this movie. And everybody got super annoyed about this. But this is again, it's just a continuation of something that that that Disney in particular has been doing. You know, the theaters have been real, real cranky with Disney because Disney has been taking essentially, I think, a 70 percent. It was Disney was working out multiple ways to fuck theaters like it was you. You had you have to put the Marvel movie in your biggest the on your biggest screens and you have to do it for six straight weeks. And we take 70 percent of the revenue of that and blah blah and and you know, I think that's that is going to probably change.
JVL00:24:26I realize we haven't asked Michael a single thing about his life, but I just want to say this. I think. The only way that any of this is sustainable is if the Paramount decree is repealed, because the only thing that makes sense is for studios to own. Oh, it has been. Yeah. Well, at some point, then all of the major exhibitors need to go out of business and be bought out of bankruptcy by studios because the the only thing that makes sense is to vertically integrate so that the. The studios also have incentive to price discriminate and have a direct control knob over that.
Sonny00:25:01Yeah. Yeah. I don't know.
Mike00:25:04Bring back the Fox theater.
JVL00:25:05Yeah. But even that won't save us like, how are you?
Mike00:25:10I feel like talking about my life is gonna derail this podcast. So, um, I don't know if I should tell you what I was gonna tell you guys about, but,
JVL00:25:20um. You're gonna defer. I mean, no. I mean, the, the only thing I'll say.
Mike00:25:24Yeah. Defer to the outtakes. Yeah. Let's, let's just defer to the outtakes and, uh, and let's move on. And should we, I mean, let's talk about box office, uh, it's, uh, it's grim out there. Number one at the box office this week, the Garfield movie followed by Furiosa, a Mad Max saga followed by if followed by kingdom of the planet of the apes, followed by your favorite here, JBL, the fall guy at number five. Uh. Yeah. Number one movie grossed $14 million at the box office. Mm. Yikes. Um, how bad is this guys?
Sonny00:26:05It's so bad. Theater chains are closing.
Mike00:26:08What are you serious? Which ones? Sorry. I, I blacked out during the, during your whole conversation.
Sonny00:26:14This is no, I mean, this is, look, it's, it's a bad, it's a bad weekend. Uh, these are all bad numbers. The, I don't even have, like, I can't even like. Pick out good indie numbers here.
JVL00:26:27Like, oh. It's the worst quarter in the history of the industry.
Sonny00:26:29I, I'm so excited that in a violent nature grossed $2 million. And I am like kind of excited that in a violent nature grossed $2,000 cuz it's a, it's an interesting indie horror movie. IFC has done a good job of kind of carving out a space between this and, uh, their late night with the devil movie. Like those, those two, but like, it's, it's nothing, it's $2 million. That's nothing. That's $1,500 a screen. It's a disaster. It's everything, everything in theaters. Oh, I'm real excited that the fall guy dropped just 30% this week. So it's, it's at $80 million total. Great. Good for it. It's really hanging around there. If, if said $80 million, it dropped just 35%. Good for it. I like, I don't know, man, everything is, everything is bad. That's why it comes down. Everything is bad.
Mike00:27:16Um, is there any, is there anything to be hopeful for on the horizon? This summer, anything that we expect to open or anything that you think could surprise
Sonny00:27:30us and like, Deadpool will gross a billion dollars. Okay.
JVL00:27:35Deadpool and the despicable me movie will gross a billion dollars.
Sonny00:27:39The despicable me movie will gross a billion dollars. It'll, I mean, they'll probably get close. They'll, they'll at least get close to a billion dollars. I don't know. It's hard to say because like billion dollar grosses were all kind of contingent on China. Like it used to be that a billion dollars was a rare amount of money that a, that a movie made. Like, you know, the dark night made a billion dollars and everybody was like, oh my God, the dark night made a billion dollars. And now like a billion for a while, a billion dollars was like the bare minimum, a comic book movie could make to be considered successful. And that's because they were getting $150 million in Chinese money. God only knows how much of that money the studio saw. It wasn't much. The studios would only get like 10% of that because the shy comms kept everything else. Uh, but the, um, but the, you know, I, I would say that Deadpool gets close to a billion dollars and everyone says, oh, comic book fatigue isn't real. And like, I'm sorry. It still is.
JVL00:28:29It still is. R rated movie in its own universe with Hugh Jackman and.
Sonny00:28:33It's an art.
JVL00:28:34Well, I, yeah, but the first two dead pools, there is no comp question.
Sonny00:28:39The comp is the other Deadpool movies. The comp is the other Deadpool movies, which are, uh, hold on. I will pull up highest grossing are rated movies, uh, list of highest grossing are rated movies. The, the top five highest grossing. Right. Or the top of the top four highest grossing are rated movies of all time. Two of those are Deadpool, Deadpool and Deadpool two. The first one did 741 million. The second one did 782 million. So like those are, or I'm sorry, the first one did 782, the second one did 785. So like those, those are the comps and those are good comps. Like if, if this movie gets up to around $800 million, that's a big win. I think. People are expecting it to do a little bit better. Cause it also has Wolverine remember, Hey JBL, I have a question for you. Do you remember? Do you remember Marvel comics circa 1991? Because this has very strong Marvel comics circa 1991 energy. Do we, do we have a problem? Do we have a problem with the box office? I got an idea. Let's stick Spider-Man in a movie. Let's stick Wolverine in a movie that'll, that'll solve all our problems.
JVL00:29:43You know, the real tell though, is that what I have heard is that no feet are visible in this movie. Well, there was a very funny entire, the entire movie. Just like the, the, the frame cuts off right at the lower.
Sonny00:29:58Mike has got to blow his brains out.
JVL00:29:59Is this a comic book joke?
Sonny00:30:01It's a Rob Liefeld joke specifically. But there was a, there's a very funny Rob Liefeld. There's a Rob Liefeld joke in the trailer. And I think there's like, so there's a shot where Wolverine and Deadpool are walking down a street, like walking down a main street. And there's a business sign behind them that says Liefeld's only feet. That's a good joke, Mike Warren.
Mike00:30:23Haha. Haha. Uh, yeah.
Sonny00:30:26So anyway, those two movies will do those, the despicable me and Deadpool and Wolverine will do fine.
Mike00:30:33What about twisters? It's got Glenn Powell in and it's a sequel to a, I hope twisters does well.
Sonny00:30:39I saw the trailer for twisters ahead of, I went to see hit man this week cause I'm, I'm reviewing it. Uh, and there was a trailer for twisters ahead of it and it looks like a good fun movie. I don't know that people want to go see big, good fun movies.
Mike00:30:52It's going to play like fall guy. Yeah. There's a, but, but there's a, there's a kid's movie coming out in, uh, in August, Harold and the purple crown starring, uh, I saw a trailer for that too. Yeah. So like the movies are back.
Sonny00:31:05I'm excited for that movie. Zachary Levi has already started doing promo for it. He's tweeting about how great our RFK jr is so that I swear to God, that's true. That's a true thing that happened. He was, he was tweeting out, Hey, you know, uh, we don't, we don't, well, he's, he's a vaccine guy. So like he was. He was Zachary Levi's of X guy, Zachary Levi's of X guy. So, uh, I think I'm pretty sure. Uh, so he, he tweeted something like, uh, Hey, you know, we don't, we don't get to hear a lot from third parties in this country, but here's an interesting video that I saw just a link to a fucking RFK jr. And so that was, that was wonderful. That's going to be great. That's going to be, that's wonderful news all around managing to alienate both sides of the political spectrum at once. Just wonderful, wonderful work there by Mr. Levi, doesn't he, we can cut this if this
Mike00:31:53is uninteresting. Doesn't he have, didn't he have some kind of production partner who is like very deep into like mega world? Am I, am I misremembering something like sometime, sometime in his past? Uh, I see.
Sonny00:32:07I don't know. Probably. I think he is. I think he's, I think he's like, uh, a, I, well, I, I, I don't wanna, I don't wanna speculate on what he is.
Mike00:32:16Sorry.
Sonny00:32:17Sorry. Um, like all, all I, I, is he from Texas? Is he from Austin? Oh, he's from Louisiana. Oh, he's from. It's not really that different, but I mean, he's, he's, uh, anyway, I don't know, man. Uh, so that, that's going to be a disaster. That's going to be a disaster. And I was, I'm kind of excited to see that movie. You know what? I took my kids to the fucking draft house to watch Garfield the other day. And after every trailer, my five-year-old son leaned over and was like, Hey daddy, can we see that? And was yes. Yes, we can. For, for all of them, even Harold in the purple crayon, and now I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't know. Am I going to take him to the AMC?
JVL00:32:56Am I going to, am I going to inculcate him in the bad habits AMC theater? Have they ever seen what it's like on the other side of the track?
Sonny00:33:03Well, I think my daughter has been to an AMC once to see the Taylor Swift movie, but I've never taken my other children to them because I avoid them like the plague.
JVL00:33:15Your other child.
Mike00:33:16Right. And you, and you, you avoid the theaters, not your children, not your children like the play.
Sonny00:33:22Right. Wow. Okay. All right. Okay. Intentional ambiguity there. Um, anyway, uh, no, everything's bad. Everything's bad. It's going to get worse. More theaters will close. And look, here is the thing. There is an actual screen surplus. There are too many screens that aren't full enough, whatever. Uh, but it's, it's all bad. It's bad.
Mike00:33:42It's going to get worse. You know what, you know, who's going to say just like he saved America, you know, what's going to save theaters is Reagan, the Dennis Quaid calling it here. Fingers crossed. It's podcast.
Sonny00:33:55All right. Character Zachary. Leave you playing in that.
Mike00:33:58I don't know. I think he's playing, uh, Don Regan. Um, okay. So, uh, let's move on then. Let's talk about the movie that we watched a documentary movie, by the way, worst title, movie pass, movie crash, like they didn't even try like, well, we can't call it movie pass. Let's add something else. Let's call it movie crash. And then the person didn't get the memo. So they need to take movie pass off of it. So they just left it. Movie pass, movie crash.
Sonny00:34:26Yeah. Why? Why just call it movie crash? That's that's uh, the, everything about this movie is kind of baffling in terms of structure.
Mike00:34:35Give us a big boy review of this documentary setting before we talk.
Sonny00:34:38Movie pass, movie crash. Uh, it's on HBO max now it's, it's pretty amusing. If you remember, uh, 2016 to 2020 or so, because it's not just about movie pass. I mean, it's about movie pass and the, so movie pass was this company that. Uh, burst into burst onto the national scene after kind of languishing for years as a smaller company because they offered, uh, people $10 a month to see an unlimited one, one per day number of movies at any theater they wanted to. And the way they did this was by sending people debit cards. And when you went to the theater and you used your movie pass, they would fill the debit card with the cost of the ticket and they would, then they would, uh, you would pay for it. But what? What that meant is if I, if I, a $10 a month movie pass subscriber went to, uh, my local AMC and bought a $14 ticket to see whatever, just like not even IMAX, Dolby, whatever, just a, you know, just a normal evening ticket for 13 or $14 or whatever, um, uh, the, the company was instantly losing $3 on that sale. And if I went the next day and saw another movie, they were losing $13, right? So like the whole thing was based on this incredible idiocy that they would make up the losses by increasing their number of users. They would, they, they make it up in volume. They lose money on every transaction, but they'd make it up in volume because once you have 5 million users, you can sell their data to the movie studios. We, we know Warner brothers who was seeing your movies. Don't you want to know? Isn't that worth billions of dollars to you? Apparently they thought, cause they lost $150 million in 2017. Amazing amount of money, just an amazing amount of money because their, their business model was bad. The problem, this movie, this movie has a couple of structural problems. The first structural problem is that the director wants to tell the story of, uh, of the, these good guys who founded a company and got forced out by evil VC guys and it's probably racism and blah, blah, blah. But like the problem with this is that their, their whole strategy was bad to begin with the whole movie past strategy. Thank you. Thank you. Like it never, it never made any sense. And they, they kind of cover all of this up. The director covers all of this up by not explaining to people how the finances of movie pass actually worked until about halfway through the film. It's not until you get to the 50 minute or so mark where they're like, okay, the way movie pass worked was you would buy a ticket and then we would reimburse you for the, or we would put the money on the card, but, but we were losing money on every transaction. And like, that's a big deal. It doesn't, that doesn't work. That doesn't, that's not a thing that works. So, uh, it, it, this, this movie has a lot of the hallmarks of some of the other movies we've talked about. The, we work documentary, um, the, uh, what was the, the fire festival, uh, what was that?
JVL00:37:40What was the fitness where company one, the, uh, but all of these companies are based on
Sonny00:37:49essentially fraud. Like they, they're. They're, they're, they're, they're instances of modern tech money, VC fraud being perpetrated upon, upon, upon people. They're all part of the zero interest rate phenomenon, cheap money leading to dumb things, et cetera, et cetera. Um, uh, and, and this movie has some of that, like JBL, it's funny, I texted you, I was like a nice little, a nice little nugget in this is that all of their offices are in WeWork space at the beginning, which is just like, it's just, it's just like a whole, it's, uh, what holds up the world? It's a turtle. Yeah. What's under the turtle. It's another turtle. It's just turtles all the way down. And that's, that's how, that's how these stories are starting to feel to me. Once you see it, once you see it, you can't unsee it, you know, they're probably in there at their WeWork, uh, getting their orders sent, getting to the office by Uber, getting to their office by Uber where they're, and they're having their lunches Instacarted to them. Like I, like the whole thing is the whole thing is amazing. Um, so, uh, but yeah, the, the, the whole business model was bad and dumb. And, uh, and this, this movie has all of the kind of hallmarks of the excess of this era where the executives are, I mean the, the executives who like take over are like bad incompetent fame, people like cartoonishly fame, hungry people who are, you know, renting private jets to fly around and making movies with John Travolta, the whole, and this is, this is, I want to, I just want to drill down on this moment in the film and in the story of MoviePass where they decide that they want to get into the movie production business. So they decide they want to get into the movie production business. They decide they want to make this movie Gotti starring John Travolta as the, uh, as the titular mobster, John Gotti, and their plan is to spend a couple million bucks making the movie. And then the way they're going to make the money back is they're going to advertise the movie on MoviePass to people and the people on MoviePass are going to buy tickets to the movie. But again, the structure of this thing is they were losing money on every ticket sold. So they were going to spend money. They were going to spend money to make the movie. They were going to tell people to go watch the movie on the app and then they were going to lose money on every ticket. How do you make money? How do you make money with this? It's just nothing. It's none of it makes any sense.
JVL00:40:03This is like the Arrested Development bit where Maybe is working at the banana stand and she's stealing bananas and she's like, you know, take a banana, take a buck. And George Michael's like, I don't think your math works up there.
Sonny00:40:14Yeah. So the whole thing is a whole thing. The whole thing is the, the, the whole thing is a disaster. Um, and again, I, I like, I don't think this, this documentary is actually not good. This it's, it's bad on, it's bad on a bunch of it's bad because I mean, look, it's your standard talking head documentary, but it's just structured so terribly that it doesn't, it doesn't quite work. But uh, anyway, I, I, I enjoyed it because I enjoyed reliving this period because I never got movie pass. Cause I looked at this and I was like, this is a, this is somehow a scam. They're going to end up stealing a bunch of money from people. And I turned out to be right. Just not the customers themselves.
Mike00:40:49Um, so before we get into the, the, the substance of the movie, I, I just wanted to associate myself with, uh, with Mr. Bunch's remarks on the quality of this documentary. Like it's, it's so, it's so cheaply made and maybe I don't watch enough of these like streamer documentary movies to know if this is like universally the case. But it's like the amount of stock footage that is just like that, that kind of has nothing to do with the movie itself. Oh yeah. With the sub subject itself. Like it was like rainy streets offensive to me.
Sonny00:41:27Somebody definitely just went into, you know, Getty or whatever it was like, I need stock footage of rainy streets to show sadness.
Mike00:41:34I need stock footage of like, uh, of a run on a bank in 1929, like, or whatever it was like something like in the old west Beatles, right? Girls. Yeah. The Beatles. That's right. There were, there were, there was beetle mania. There was like what? And, and I, I don't know if you really touched on this Sonny, uh, but like the, the structure of it, where there's a bit of a bait and switch where you kind of get this like great story. And then it's like, well, let's go back in time and tell the origin of it made no sense
JVL00:42:04to me. I was like, well, the middle 40 minutes of this thing are jumping backwards to give Stacy spikes his life story. I was so uninterested.
Mike00:42:13I'm sorry. It was, it was so interesting to me, uh, and unimpressive. So I just want to get that out of it. We want to talk about the substance of it, but it just, but again, like this is part
Sonny00:42:22of the problem. The, the, the project of this film is to like rehab bill. I would be shocked if Stacy spikes did not pay to have this movie made because the whole
JVL00:42:31point of the movie is to like rehabilitate him as this soft launch the renewed movie
Sonny00:42:36path. Right? So you, so you basically, the, the way the story is structured is you get the, you get the highs and then it crashes and then you flash back to this guy who was the actual founder and then you tell his story and you see how it was taken. It's taken away from him. The whole thing should have just been chronological. You can do maybe, maybe do a couple of minutes at the beginning about like we were, we were spending a million dollars on jets, blah, blah, blah. But then you just go back to the beginning and instead again, and, and this is here's, I don't Jamie, I'm curious to get your take on this because at the end of the film spikes comes on the screen. He says, we just had our first profitable year at movie pass and I'm fascinated by this because I was looking at the app and I was trying to figure out how they do this. Um, movie passes now a totally private company, which means they don't have to do any disclosures is my understanding. Am I right? I'm right. And so he just says, yeah, we're profitable now. And everybody repeats the press release. Oh yeah. We're profitable now. I would love to get a glimpse at what the actual financials of this, right?
JVL00:43:38The, the statement of the CEO of a privately held company, utterly meaningless.
Mike00:43:44Hold on. Hold on. Are you suggesting that this company could? It could have two scam artists running it in its history.
Sonny00:43:52That's outrageous. I'm not suggesting, I'm not suggesting that because it does seem from the documentary. It does feel that it, at the very least, like spikes had some idea of how to make the company not be a bonfire of cash. You lose a little bit of money and then you, and then you pivot to this thing where you're doing the kind of marketplace, which is what they're doing now, whatever I like. I could kind of, I could see that working. And you know, I, maybe he's a good guy and maybe it's all going to work out, but I like, I, I just, I hear these guys say like, oh yeah, we're profitable and everybody repeat, oh yeah, they're profitable. And I'm like, really, how, how?
JVL00:44:32So it's, I mean, looking at their business, it does. It's not crazy to me, the idea that they can be profitable because, uh, they now are much closer to being like audible than they are like movie pass, um, you subscribe at a set level. That set level gives you a number of credits, which you can use each month. And I believe there is a, it basically translates to like 10, 50 or $12 for every movie ticket you see. But the movies that are at cheaper times, are you going to use slightly fewer credits than like a normal movie? And also because they are, I assume. Very few people who are AMC goers or Alamo goers would be of the new movie pass because the AMC and Alamo deals are much better than movie pass, right? So the movie pass customers are going to be primarily people going to indie theaters, which suggests to me that movie pass has more leeway to negotiate some slight discounts with that. Maybe I'm wrong, but the point is that this is a terrible, terrible, terrible document. And it's one of these subjects that I happen to know a tremendous amount about because I followed movie pass very closely and the level of incompetence, I mean, they get, they have a guy, Mitch Lowe, who agrees to be a S a sit for an interview for this documentary. And they never ask him about the fact that he is under criminal indictment and facing trial for fraud.
Mike00:46:15Exactly.
JVL00:46:16They never fucking ask him about that. And like, he's one of the two main characters and he is awaiting trial. I mean, what, this seems like an important thing to ask him about, uh, they treat him basically as a friendly witness, which suggests to me that they paid him. Um, he probably pocketed something from this, uh, they, they, so the other guy, Ted Farnsworth, who does not appear in this because he's, he's super duper going to jail. Oh yeah. This, this guy is. So they raise, I mean, this guy is a middle-aged Billy McFarland, but they never tell you that they sort of hint around about it. So for instance, they say, uh, Hey, you know, when you go Googling this guy, you find a lot of websites that say that Ted Farnsworth is definitely not a fraud and that they all look like they were written by the same person. That's kind of weird. And that's it. They just never mentioned it again.
Mike00:47:16Yeah. So there are photos of him hawking, um, some supplement or vitamin supplements, right? Or, or energy drinks.
JVL00:47:26It's all like subtext his post, his post, uh, post movie pass career. He went and founded a company called Vinco ventures, which he promised. Of course, what would he do? Right. What was super big after movie pass, tick tock Vinco ventures was going to be a quote, tick tock killer. According to Ted, Ted Farnsworth, um, like it just, of course, that's the next, you know, this is, and I'm sure if he hadn't been indicted, he would be on to AI now, right? Something he'd be doing would be AI because AI is the big thing. The movie just doesn't, the chronology is bad. It misses out like the really interesting stuff. It does not at all press the guys who brought in Mitch low. So we get this nice liberal California guy who. Uh, was one of the early Stacy spikes backers who ran against Kamala Harris for attorney general in California ever heard of her. And he wanted to bring in Mike low and there does not seem to be any questions asked of him. Like, so why was that?
Mike00:48:33Yeah. Hmm. You know, like this, oh, he's, he's, he's, he's the one Mitchell, well, but, but this, this other guy whose name is escaping me, like the, they gloss over the fact that it was him who had the two board seats that allowed him and Mitch low to out, out, because he invested
Sonny00:48:55all the money. I mean, which is big sense. They were, they were, they were burning through his money, which is why, you know, which is why he was like, we need to get somebody who will bring in more money.
JVL00:49:04We gotta go, go get these guys, but the documentary filmmakers should have said to him. So, uh, why Mitch low? What was it about this guy? And they'd be like, why didn't you understand he was a fraud? You know, like the, this guy should have been crucial that they made the, yes, the documentary. They just miss all of the obvious questions. They don't ask any of the obvious questions. Um, and it, in a weird way, it underplays how much fraud was going on. Like normally a documentary you would think would like overplay its hand. This underplays it. When they talk about the lockout, like this is really, really bad that they explain what
Sonny00:49:44happened. Explain what happened to you.
JVL00:49:46So they were trying to figure out towards the end, well, how do we make more money? And they realized they couldn't make any more money.
Mike00:49:53So they then pivoted to how do we spend less money?
JVL00:49:56And Ted Farnsworth comes up with the idea of, well, what if we just stopped giving people movie tickets? And Mitch is like, yeah, that's a really good idea. So they, they take this to the team in writing. They take this to the team in writing. At which point, uh, whoever is COO says something like, um, we can't do that. If we do that, the FTC, which is already quite interested in us will be all over us. And so Mitch's counteroffer is, well, what if we only do it to the people who use us
Mike00:50:36the most, they can't even fraud, right?
JVL00:50:41They go and they pull a list from their file. Of the 75,000 most active users and they lock them out of their accounts and then send them a message saying, yeah, we detected some fraudulent and or suspicious activity. So we had to reset the passwords on your accounts. And uh, this is again, this is in the criminal complaint. They self-consciously understood that this was not true, that this was a false excuse. We're making this was purely an attempt to stop spending money. And then when people started saying, well, can we reset the password in my account? They just didn't respond. It just went dark on customer service. So people couldn't get into their accounts. And I think the documentary, I mean, I'm not going to say it like doesn't do a good job of explaining it, but I don't think it does a very good job of explaining how it does.
Sonny00:51:41It does an okay job of explaining it, but it doesn't dwell on it at all. It's just like, yeah. There's like the actual criminal thing that they did. This is like the thing people are going to go to jail for probably, well, or at least get fined heavily for and, and they're just like, yeah, that happened.
JVL00:51:56Yeah. But the other thing they did is the, the lying, because they were a publicly traded company, um, they were lying about revenue. And so they were going around saying, we have these deals signed with AI. It's big data, et cetera, et cetera. And it wasn't like that. They just didn't quite have the deal signed yet. It's that they never, they were not even in process on it. So this is the thing to understand about when they talked about how, like, you know, w w our other big revenue streams can be data. You know, this data is the new oil, blah, blah, blah, blah, right. It isn't the fact that like they were wrong about it or anything. They weren't even trying to do their data, right. It was just like, it was just pure music, man. You know, you need a monorail. There was no, they were not, they were not even collecting the data. Yeah. Their data collection was like this big. That does not come through trying to sell it at anybody that does not come through it
Mike00:52:57to your point on, in the documentary, it's like they, they, it's like they missed the big story in favor of like a very compelling and hilarious fraud story of the Coachella thing and the, and the moot. The, the John Gotti movie and all that stuff. But you're right. It's like they missed that big thing staring them right in the face.
JVL00:53:21And the, the, the last thing that they miss is, and this is the thing which I have not been able to find it anywhere. So Ted Farnsworth is getting money from Hudson Bay, which is a hedge fund. Hudson Bay also underwrites, uh, it underwrites what he was doing before movie pass immediately. It underwrites his movie. Past days when he is like, uh, Helios management or whatever, which is the company he's running then underwritten by Hudson Bay and underwrites his Tik TOK killer app, which he does afterwards. It is not clear to me why Hudson Bay is funneling money to him. And this is like the, the big unanswered question in all of this and the documentary barely even poses. I mean, it's fine. Look, if, if the doc filmmakers couldn't get to the bottom of that, that's fine. But then you should be ending with the big question of why is this multi-billion dollar hedge fund pushing all this cash downstream to this fraud guy and they don't, they don't even bother. They just don't. Yeah. It's just incompetent documentary filmmaking.
Sonny00:54:32I mean, like I almost, I almost wonder if they were trying to ins I, so that was, that was my big question too. Like what is Hudson? I don't even come out of this knowing like what Hudson Bay is. Totally agree. It's like, it's a hedge fund. I was like, wait, what is, what is, what are they doing? What are they, what else are they invested in? Like what's their deal? And like, I, I almost wonder if they, there was so little actual information there to allow people to make the insinuation that this is like some sort of Epstein situation, not like necessarily sex trafficking, whatever, but like a guy who has clearly like blackmailing somebody somewhere to get endless rivers of money. Because that's what it feels like watching this like that. That's certainly like I'm watching this and I'm like, wait, where, why is Hudson giving this guy? All this cash? Like, is it his money? I don't understand where, what's it, where is it coming from?
JVL00:55:18Is Hudson a legit company? Yeah. I mean, maybe Hudson says that they've got, for all we know, Hudson is another Ted Farnsworth front. Right. I mean, this is, but anyway, it's just in documentaries. It's not always fair to say that documentary should be like reading a long form investigative piece, but, but this one should have been documentaries of this sort absolutely should
Sonny00:55:42be like talking head. Documentaries like this, where you're telling a specific story about a specific period of time should read like a New Yorker story. They shouldn't be, they shouldn't be impressionistic, like moonage daydream, uh, David Bowie document music documentary. Like you, you, you want, like, you're telling a story, tell the story.
Mike00:55:59Yeah.
Sonny00:56:00Can I say my thoughts because, uh, about the, about, oh, Mike wants to talk Mike once Mike wants to say his thoughts. Oh, okay.
Mike00:56:09You know, that's all the time we're going to give to this episode. You know, about the, about movie pass, uh, as a product. So as I was watching all of this, I thought like, okay, movie pass, no pun intended. Like it just passed me by at the time. Like it was just not, I was, I was not in a season of like going to the movies ever, uh, during this time period, like young kids and you know, all that sort of thing. So like, I didn't really understand like the, the, the hype around it. Like I, once it kind of started to fade. Fail. That's when it got on my radar. So, um, this was really kind of the, the most introduction to like the history of movie pass that I got. And, and I, I never understood how this was a good idea at any like scaled down or scaled up. It never made any sense to me. And, um, the story of the, the, the sort of the story of like, okay, we're going to shunt aside these two black founders and put these, you know, uh, flim, white flim, flam guys in, you know, on, on CNBC and Fox business every day as the face of the company. Um, I get that. And it was a great, that's like a, that's a, that's a good, interesting angle and story, but I never thought Stacy spikes is original idea made any sense at all. Like it is like, it is, it is a gym membership. Concept, except people actually like to go to the movies like they.
JVL00:57:47Yeah. I mean, I, his, his idea makes sense at a very small scale, which I think is the scale he pursues. Right. I mean, I don't think his like 20,000 members was his vision for the thing. Not 5 million. Right. Right. And I mean, the reason I followed movie pass so closely is because it's part of this, uh, broader zero interest. Interest rate tech insanity that we went through from like 2012 to 2020. And this is, you know, the, uh, Ron John Roy, who's a VC guy wrote a piece about this, which blew up in like 2018 about food delivery services.
Mike00:58:32And he was using, I don't remember whether I don't remember which of the food delivery
JVL00:58:36services he was using, but he went and figured out that they were selling a, a $24 piece dollar pizza for $16. And it was like the craziest fucking like they're that's just how it was, right? They were, they were not only selling, they were buying and then delivering a pizza that cost the, the company $24 to buy. And they were selling them for $16 and he was like, what the fuck is like piece of arbitrage and it's insane. And uh, it's only, well, I don't want to go full commie on you, but it's not great. Bob. Yeah.
Mike00:59:14I don't know. I just, I never, the, the idea itself, the idea of adding this middleman into a, an experience where there already are middlemen, right? There's like the distributors and the theaters and all that stuff. Like what of course has ended up happening is the, the big chains have their own version of this anyway.
Sonny00:59:34Right.
JVL00:59:35Well, I think what they hope to was just get bought. Right.
Sonny00:59:38I think that was the, look, I think there's, there's, there's what movie pass. Pass is trying to do now. So let me see if I'm explaining this to people, right, JBL. So movie pass now is set up where you spend 10 bucks a month or whatever. You spend some amount of money a month and you get some number of credits a month and the credits, uh, the, the actual tickets that you buy, the amount of money for the, uh, ticket is a variable credit cost. So if you, if you buy a, uh, if you buy a Friday night, 8:00 PM tickets, 7:00 PM tickets, 8:00 PM ticket, that movie is going to cost you more credits than a Tuesday, you know, 2:00 PM screening. Right. Correct. All right. And so there is a version of movie pass that is good for everyone in the sense that it creates a system where audience members who are cost-conscious are funneled into lower, uh, lower attended screenings, less attended screenings, elasticity, right. Right. And they, and, and. Uh, the way that movie pass pays for this is they get a discount, they get a bulk discount on such tickets. They pay the normal price for, you know, the Friday evening tickets, they get a bulk discount for doing. All right. So, so there's a version of this where everybody from the consumer to the theater to movie pass itself can benefit. And I can, I can see.
Mike01:01:03Which, which it was going in that direction if you believe the documentary, but, but with that AMC, uh, CEO. Who's like talking to them and steps down. Like you could.
Sonny01:01:14Well, that that's, that's another part. That's very unclear. Exactly. What happened there? Who, who they, they, they almost make it sound like the guy at AMC stepped down because he wanted to do this. And I, I don't think that was the case. I don't know. Like, Hey, he stepped down because AMC was being run into the fucking ground. Um, but the, uh, uh, but the, I, I don't know, I, I, I, there's a version of that too. That kind of makes some sense. Um, but again, it doesn't make sense if you're the vast. The vast majority of people and you live closest to one specific movie theater, like most people have one movie theater in town at this point, they have an AMC or they have a Regal or they have a Cinemark. Um, and they go to that, uh, you know, I am a weirdo because I live in a, I live in an area where, well, not anymore, but I'm five minutes from a draft house. I'm five minutes from a Regal. I'm about 10 minutes from an AMC. I'm about 15 minutes from a Cinemark and I'm about 12 minutes from an Angelica. So like my, my, this is the sort of, this sort of thing would work. For me. But I feel like most people are just better off doing the, the, um, doing, doing what we have now, which is the a list or the season pass and there, and, and the studio, the theaters are better off just doing this as well, right? Because this is the, the thing that never made sense about movie passes that they were paying full price for movie tickets, which means that they were reimbursing both the studio and the theater at the same time, theaters offering their own version of this only have to reimburse the studio. So if you, if you live in an area where, again, this, I'm just using generic numbers here, please don't yell at me in the comments. If you live in an area where the average cost of a movie ticket is $10 and you live next to an AMC and you get AMCA list, AMCA list is $20 a month. You, you, if you go see four movies, uh, a month, you're essentially breaking the, the theater is essentially breaking even with what they have to share with the, the, um, with the studios. More or less.
JVL01:03:08If you buy any popcorn, they come ahead and if they buy any
Sonny01:03:10popcorn, they come ahead. Now, this, this, all of these calculuses change once you start adding an IMAX and Dolby, um, you know, the difference between seeing bad boys four on an opening night versus, you know, uh, the first Omen and it's six week. Like there, you get into all sorts of different, different numbers, what have yous. But like the idea there is at least there's a cushion for the theaters. The theaters have a built in cushion, which, which is that the, instead of getting their cut of the revenue for each ticket sold, they get $20 a month. And their idea is, look, we get $240 a year from these people, regardless if, as long as we're not, uh, as long as we're not giving, you know, away a thousand dollars per customer in, in sales to the studios, we're probably going to come out ahead on popcorn sales, icy sales, whatever. It just doesn't make sense to add an extra layer of bureaucracy in there with another company taking their own cut. Like it doesn't, it doesn't work particularly when that company is paying both sides of it, but when they're paying the studios and the theaters, it just doesn't make any sense.
Mike01:04:10Well, you're welcome for my thoughts on this, which, which, uh, contributed to the conversation.
Sonny01:04:16I'm sorry. Next week. We'll do something you want to do. We'll talk.
Mike01:04:20We'll talk about a thing. You want to talk about? Aw, thanks guys. Uh, all right. Well, any other, I know that's not happening. Uh, any other final thoughts on what, what the fuck is this called? Movie pass, movie crash, movie crash, worst title ever. Anything. Okay. Uh, that is all the time we are going to give to this episode, join us over at sub beacon dot com, and we'll talk to you next time. So, uh, we did a fun thing at the last, uh, little league, uh, coach pitch practice, uh, which I had to run. Uh, so I've run now, like the last three, I'm the assistant coach, but I've run the last three, uh, or four practices on my own. Um, our, our main coach has all these other obligations. So I told him, um, that I expect to be, uh, cut into his salary for, for coaching. And when he said, what's half of zero, um, so I'm not getting any, you know, that, but I did spend a little, my own money to get water balloons and we had a water balloon Derby at the last practice and the kids had a fricking blast. It was so much fun. You're looking at me skeptically.
JVL01:05:37JBL. I mean, I'm sure the kids had fun. Did you have fun?
Mike01:05:41Yeah, it was great. It was so much fun to throw the water balloons and they got a little plastic bat and they whack it. It was, it was, it was terrific.
JVL01:05:49No, you don't like that idea. I mean, I, I think if I was, uh, eight years old, I think it was fantastic.
Mike01:05:56Exactly. Well, what's the point? What is the point? If the eight year olds are not having fun, the point is to make your life five, 10% easier. Yeah, it was, it was great.
JVL01:06:07It was fun. I guess I'm sorry for trying to make sure. No, I'm saying you're a better person than me. That's what I'm saying. Michael, I'm saying you did something for the kids. That was fun for them that I would not have done because I would have viewed it simply as more work for me for you. This is me expressing admiration, Michael, but thank you.
Mike01:06:26It, it's fun to do fun things with kids sometimes, no, is it sound right to me?
Sonny01:06:33Sure.
Mike01:06:34It's fine.
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