I’m going to watch the MoviePass documentary for one reason only

polygon.com:

Max has released a trailer for its documentary MoviePass, MovieCrash, coming to the streaming service on May 29. And frankly, it looks awful. The trailer makes the film look like the worst kind of bubbly, hyperbolic TV news report, full of over-the-top voiceover, staccato sound bites, and sensationalist quotes, all trying to inject riffy, bouncy energy into a story that doesn’t need zhuzhing up. The actual doc may be nothing like this; trailers are notoriously unreliable about reflecting what a movie is actually like. But either way, I don’t care. I’m all in, for one reason: I just want to see the faces of the people behind the story I followed with absolute nonstop disbelief for two full years of “Oh God, what now?” schadenfreude.

MoviePass was around for six years as a largely under-the-radar, somewhat pricey subscription service for movie tickets before analytics firm Helios and Matheson acquired it. In 2017, the revamped company introduced an unbeatable subscription service: Members could get unlimited movie tickets for about $10 a month. “How could this business model possibly work?” industry-watchers asked at the time. The answer: It couldn’t. Helios and Matheson lost hundreds of millions of dollars on the project, while visibly, awkwardly, and very publicly flailing to redefine the company’s intentions every few weeks.

While all this was happening, I was the Movies Editor over at The Verge, and we reported on every new beat in the story as it happened, because our readers loved knowing what new nonsense MoviePass was up to. What made the story so fascinating and engaging was how absolutely clear it was that Helios and Matheson did not know anything about the industry it was trying to disrupt, and how rapidly it kept changing the story about what MoviePass was intended to do.

The company clearly thought its subscriber base would give it leverage over the industry, and was willing to endure huge losses while it tried to figure out what to do with that leverage.