Business Wire:

MoviePassâ„¢, the nation’s premier movie theater subscription service and a majority-owned subsidiary of Helios and Matheson Analytics Inc. (Nasdaq: HMNY) (“Helios"), today announced the implementation of several new measures aimed at accelerating the plan for profitability. Through these new steps, the company believes it will be able to compress its timeline to reach profitability.

Approaching the one-year anniversary of introducing its standard $9.95 price point, the MoviePass community has grown to more than 3 million members and in turn has contributed to record box office growth, responsible for approximately 6 percent of the nation’s total box office sales in the first half of 2018. In addition, MoviePass Ventures and MoviePass Films are contributing to the company’s ancillary revenue.

Today, the company has implemented several elements of a long-term growth plan to protect the existing community and set it up for future sustainable growth.

Hoo-boy, here we go…these are the new changes:

• A future increase of the standard pricing plan to $14.95 per month within the next 30 days.
• First Run Movies opening on 1,000+ Screens to be limited in their availability during the first two weeks, unless made available on a promotional basis,
• Implementation of additional tactics to prevent abuse of the MoviePass service.

So, for those keeping track - the MoviePass plan started as:

• For $9.99/month, see 1 movie a day.

And now it will be:

• For $14.99/month, see 1 movie a day, but not the same movie twice, so long as it’s a small indie film or a movie which is two weeks old, and not a lot of people are seeing it (because you may need to pay an additional surge cost).

I get it. Things have been hard for MoviePass. They’re bleeding money. They’re not sustainable. They’re treading water and just trying to make things work.

It’s just sad.