Wednesday, July 3, 2019
MoviePass temporarily suspends service to improve its mobile app
MoviePass is temporarily suspending its service, starting on July 4, in order to finish working on improvements to its mobile app, the company announced today. The hiatus comes after a difficult year for the cash-burning company, and as Regal, the second-largest movie theater chain in the United States, is reportedly preparing to launch its own ticket subscription service.
MoviePass’ announcement said the hiatus will start at 5 A.M. Eastern Time on July 4 and that subscribers will be automatically credited for the number of affected days once service resumes. It did not say when service would return, but replies to customers from its Twitter account say the company “estimate[s] this process will take several weeks.”
This is an especially inopportune time for a hiatus because the July 4 holiday is when many major titles are released. In a press statement, MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe said “There’s never a good time to have to do this. But to complete the improved version of our app, one that we believe will provide a much better experience for our subscribers, it has to be done.”
He added that “We have listened and we understand the frustrations of our subscribers. To provide the level of service you deserve and we can be proud of, we need to improve our mobile app. We plan to make this improvement by utilizing an enhanced technology platform, which is in the final stages of completion.”
MoviePass (owned by Helios and Matheson Analytics) and competitor Sinemia both offer subscription plans that give users access to multiple films in one month for a flat fee, but they have been locked in an expensive war of attrition as they compete for subscribers and box office sales. Both companies have also been hit with constant complaints about poor customer service. When Sinemia launched, it was able to capitalize on anti-MoviePass sentiment, but quickly began to rack up its own negative feedback about hidden fees, cancellations without refunds and poor app performance.
This makes room for new rivals to step in. For example, AMC’s A-List service reached 785,000 subscribers in May and if Regal’s version comes to fruition, it may also appeal to movie-goers who are willing to stick to one chain in exchange for consistent service.
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Jerry Colonna was a good venture capitalist. Still, when he became engulfed in a dangerous depression after the dot.com bubble’s burst — owing to the economic crash, to the terrorist attack in New York, to the approach of middle age — he saved himself by leaving VC, a kind of accidental if lucrative profession, and learning how to coach others.
What he tells them from the outset — as he learned about himself firsthand — is that many executives hobble themselves unwittingly out of fear or some other driving force that they have no idea even exists, a driver that has be to identified to be conquered. Colonna learned later than he might like that he associated money with safety, after growing up in a chaotic environment with an alcoholic father, a mother with mental illness, and six siblings who were at times separated and cared for by other family members. Among these: Colonna’s grandparents who owned a building in New York and provided their grandchildren both love, as well as that missing sense of security.
Of course, not everyone has access to Colonna, or his team of roughly 25 other coaches and facilitators, or to one of his bootcamps for CEOs. It’s for this reason that Colonna recently authored the book “Reboot,” in which he shares many of his own stories while also signaling to readers the importance of recognizing that they aren’t crazy, that much of modern life is a pretense, and that with some introspection, it’s possible to understand the roots of one’s character structure (and, perhaps, stop embracing them unconsciously).
We talked with Colonna today about the book in a conference call attended by dozens of Extra Crunch readers. We’ll be releasing a transcript of that call shortly. In the meantime, we wanted to share part of the exchange that centered on the question: are most executives ultimately trying to impress their parents — either living or dead? After all, Colonna says that the first person to come to him for real advice — when Colonna was still advising startups as a board member — was a young attorney who hated his profession and went to law school to please his father.
In a nutshell, the answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, is yes — at least to some degree. “I think most of us are in an interesting dialogue with the belief systems we developed as children, and that most leaders are shaped, consciously or not, by those early belief systems,” he said earlier today. “If you believe the world is a dog-eat-dog world, where everybody is out to get their own, you’re going to unconsciously build an organization that’s filled with self-optimizers. Then you’re going to call a coach and ask, “Geez, why isn’t anyone trusting each other?”
Indeed, Colonna’s view (and he has seen a lot of executives over the years) is that “one of the most important forces of any child’s life are their parents. They shape positively and negatively our whole world view because they give us the sense of love, safety and belonging; they give us our sense of worthiness as human beings.” It’s why when he’s doing his leadership coaching and development work, he works to “really understand the early structures of a person’s life — not so we can spend the entire time therapeutically going through it, but so we can have a context for what they might be struggling with right now.”
It was a wide-ranging chat, touching on whether people can become great leaders without facing some childhood adversity, the reason that coping skills sometimes become impediments, and why the 30s can be the trickiest decade of all for people leading organizations.
More on our chat soon, and if you don’t subscribe to Extra Crunch, you can learn more here.
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