In brief: Sinemia, a movie ticketing service that offers a variety of monthly subscriptions to theatergoers, has just announced an unlimited plan for $30 per month. The service hopes to lure customers who were once MoviePass subscribers.
MoviePass struggled to make its "unlimited" package work almost from the very beginning. It initially offered members one movie per day for $10 per month. However, this plan ultimately proved unsustainable. MoviePass hemorrhaged money as it continued to tweak its model and impose limits to subscriptions. Now the service offers just three movies per month to subscribers.
Now that MoviePass has no unlimited plan, Sinemia has decided to fill that void. The company announced today that it would begin offering viewers in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia an unlimited plan for $30 per month.
Like MoviePass' old plan, unlimited is does not really mean unlimited. Subscribers are restricted to one movie per day. However, the $30 price point is much more manageable for the company than the $10 fee MoviePass was charging.
"The new plan offers a sustainable, reasonable model for seeing movies on an unlimited basis," said the company. "With the average US ticket price at about $9 per film, the plan offers unlimited movies for the value of about three standard movie tickets each month."
"Years of experience and data analysis have taught Oguz the price at which he can offer an unlimited movie buffet---about 2.5 times the cost of a single ticket in a given market---without giving his ledger a world-class bellyache."
Sinemia has already proven that this is a sustainable model since it has been offering it in Europe since 2014. According to Wired, the only reason that the company didn't introduce it in the US was because MoviePass was already providing the same plan for $10 per month.
"We couldn't introduce unlimited because there was an unlimited, and it was $9.99," said Sinemia CEO Rifat Oguz. "It would have been meaningless to introduce a three-times-more-expensive plan."
So instead, Sinemia waited, suspecting that what MoviePass was attempting was going to fail. The dust has hardly settled since its rival restricted movies to three per month, and now Sinemia has struck while the iron is still hot offering unlimited tickets before MoviePass has even had time to restructure itself.
The $30 "Movie Every Day" membership (standard format movies only) now makes up Sinemia's fifth tier. If that plan does not suit your movie-going habits, it also offers a $5 subscription which allows you to see one movie per month. For $10/month, you get 3 movies. A $13 package allows two shows a month but includes 3D, 4D, and IMAX options. The fourth tier lets users watch three films per month in any format for $18/month.
Now that Sinemia is directly competing in the US, it will be interesting to see if MoviePass restructures based on its rival's tier scale.