I bought my Moviepass a few months ago and have been using it quite a bit. My wife and I went up from probably about twice a month to about 2-3 times a week. It is really nice if you don’t have to think about the cost of watching a movie any more.

We found ourselves sometimes just driving by a theater and ending up just walking in to watch a movie.

Over the last few months, there was quite some rumor about what Moviepass is going to do, in reaction to the market getting more interesting, so to say. There are a couple alternatives to it, but for us it’s still the best bet.

They just announced that they will roll out a few new options over the next few weeks:

Bring-a-Guest

This new feature will allow you to bring a guest with you to a theater. You will have to pay the full price for that person. So how is it useful? Mostly at theaters that have the e-ticketing feature with Moviepass. That way you can buy the tickets in one transaction and you will be able to sit right next to each other.

Also, in case that person buys themselves a Moviepass within 24 hours, the ticket price will be refunded!

Peak Pricing

This is kind of a bummer, because it brings up the price. They will start charging extra if you choose to see a movie at peak times, so I would think it is opening weekends of big movies for example.

Although this kind of sucks, I find that because of the Moviepass, we actually prefer seeing movies a little later and not on opening weekend. There is usually less traffic and it’s a nicer experience doing that. So this might be unfortunate for some moviegoers, it is not really for us.

One upside though. We have an annual subscription and we are not affected by this price hike until our annual subscription renews. The same applies to quarterly subscribers. Also they will introduce a once-per-month peak time for free-feature soon.

Premium Showings

This is actually a cool new feature and I like it! Until now you were not allowed to watch 3D, IMAX or other premium showings. That will change, although it will cost a couple bucks extra. I think this is totally fair and I am OK with paying a little extra for that.

So all in all I think the changes are OK. They don’t influence me too much since we live in an area where a lot of theaters don’t even have assigned seating.

I wonder if they will introduce the family plan soon. They mentioned it in an email a while ago, but not in the latest one introducing these features.