Can Subscribers Cancel MoviePass? Company Says Bug Fixed But Complaints Continue

Troubles for beleaguered tech startup MoviePass continue to mount, as the company has generated negative press this week for a service glitch. After months of controversial plan changes, service outages and a general lack of confidence in the service, many former subscribers learned in an email Monday night that their subscriptions had been automatically reactivated after cancellation.

To add to the problem, those looking to unsubscribe after the email went out received error messages instead of confirmations.

MoviePass on Monday afternoon sent an email to its subscribers alerting them to the forthcoming new base subscription model that they will all be migrated to this week. Under the new structure, subscriptions are back to $9.95 per month after an announced, and then quickly scrapped, price hike. However, subscribers are limited to three movies per month and can't see any movie they want. MoviePass started severely limiting daily selections over the weekend, the New York Post reported.

There was a clause at the end of the email notifying users who had recently canceled their plans that they would be reactivated. The email can be seen below, in one of countless Twitter posts by angry users who wanted to cancel their plans.

Many subscribers continue to wonder how they delete their account.

To cancel MoviePass, a subscriber must open the mobile app and go to the Account tab. Once there, they should hit Account Details and then Plan & Billing. There will be a red "Cancel" button with a text prompt to write out a reason for canceling MoviePass. Once that has been filled out, the user should hit the Cancel button.

Unfortunately, the process currently isn't working for many subscribers. Writing out a reason for cancellation of any length resulted in the app giving an error message implying that the user had not written anything.

MoviePass called this a bug in a statement provided to Mic on Tuesday. The service also said it had been fixed and "all cancellation requests are being correctly processed and no members were being blocked from canceling their accounts." However, many subscribers took to Twitter on Wednesday to express frustration with an inability to cancel their subscription.

MoviePass experienced a surge in membership last August when it launched a $10 per month service that let users see as many movies as they wanted. Questions about its sustainability may have been answered throughout 2018, as the app eventually introduced surge pricing and limited ticket availability for major releases. A major weekend outage led to the aforementioned price increase, which was scrapped before it was implemented.

In recent weeks, shares of MoviePass parent company Helios and Matheson Analytics (HMNY) have plummeted from $20 to less than $0.05.