From the brink of bankruptcy, MoviePass is trying to make a comeback and the waitlist is set to open on Thursday.
The CEO and co-founder of MoviePass, Stacy Spikes, announced that the new program is expected to kick off in September and detailed plans to open a waitlist this week for movie lovers to purchase the card.
“We are so excited to announce that we are beginning our launch sequence to bring MoviePass back,” Spikes wrote.
According to the MoviePass website, the waitlist will open on Aug. 25 at 7 a.m. Mountain Time and it will close on Aug. 29 at 9:59 p.m. The new MoviePass should be ready to launch around Sept. 5 and the new card will have three pricing tiers costing $10, $20 or $30 depending on the market, according to The Wall Street Journal. Each tier will get a certain amount of credits to be able to use toward movies each month.
The waitlist is free and will be the only way to sign up for the service in the foreseeable future, according to the email MoviePass sent out to its customers. Spikes also wrote that the service will be offered on a first-come, first-served basis. Space is expected to be limited and engagement will help determine which markets will open first.
“Each person who joins the waitlist will receive 10 friend invites that will activate when they sign up for the service. If you do not make it on the waitlist the only way you will be able to join in the future is to receive an invite from someone,” Spikes wrote.
Time magazine reported that MoviePass had more than 3 million members in the late 2010s but eventually fell apart when the deal became too good to be sustained. Cardholders were originally allowed to see one movie per day at participating theaters for just $9.95 a month.
MoviePass closed its doors after the company was sold to a private equity group back in 2017 for mismanagement. The company further collapsed in 2019 but was bought out of bankruptcy when Spikes purchased it in November 2021, according to Business Insider.
Spikes was one of the original founders of MoviePass before it went dark and now has taken charge in announcing the relaunch of the ticketing service. Variety reported that in a presentation last February, Spikes said “a lot of people lost money, a lot of people lost trust,” after the company’s downfall.