MoviePass Overhauls Rules Again, Limits Users To Three Movies Per Month

MoviePass has again completely overhauled the rules of the service before paying customers had a chance to adjust to a previous pricing change. The subscription-based movie ticket discount service announced on Monday that it would reverse a price hike it announced last week, while severely limiting the number of movies customers can see with a subscription.

A week ago, MoviePass said it would raise the price of its base subscription from $10 to $15 per month. At the same time, tickets to new releases from major studios would only be available on a first-come, first-serve basis for their first two weeks in theaters. According to Monday’s press release, the price increase is null and void; subscriptions will go back to $10 per month.

However, customers will be limited to only three movie tickets per month under the new plan. For about a month, new subscribers could only get a plan that limited them to four movies in a month. By early May, the unlimited model that made MoviePass famous was back in effect.

Lastly, MoviePass said it would “suspend” its policies of putting surge prices on popular movies and making some users verify their tickets. Starting in July, certain screenings of major movies would carry a surge price to reflect high demand. These “peak prices” could be as high as $8, which is close to the cost of a MoviePass subscription.

MoviePass also spent the last few months occasionally making users verify their tickets by taking a photo of it through the MoviePass mobile app. That will no longer be the case. All of the changes listed above will go into effect on Aug. 15.

The past couple of weeks have been tumultuous for MoviePass. Its parent company, Helios & Matheson Analytics, ran out of money during the last weekend in July. That meant the service went down for many users when the most people go to movie theaters.

That outage caused shares of Helios & Matheson (HMNY) to plummet in recent days. Shares of Helios & Matheson surged 30 percent in early trading on Monday.