MoviePass was once a cinephile’s dream. Throughout the 2010s, the company allowed users to pay a monthly fee to watch a movie a day in theaters. In 2018, it cost $9.95 for a subscription. That’s less than what some theaters charged for one film screening, let alone 30, and the company went under one year later.
Now, MoviePass is back, and it’s touting a crypto-powered rebrand. On Thursday, the firm unveiled “Mogul,” which lets users fill out rosters and predict what movies are poised to win big at the box office and what actors will pull in the most awards. The product, which is available to U.S. players, uses an in-game currency and is built on the Sui blockchain.
MoviePass CEO Stacy Spikes stressed to Fortune that the in-game currency is just like “Monopoly money” and that they haven’t decided on whether “it becomes real” yet. The only information the platform puts on the blockchain is game-related data, like a player’s performance, he added.
The CEO had thought about fashioning Mogul like a crypto-powered prediction market, or a locale where bettors can gamble money on who they think will win an election and other real-world events. However, he and his team eventually decided against it, he said.
“When [you] talk to laypeople and you say ‘crypto,’ it means you’re doing a memecoin, you’re doing something that Trump is doing, you’re doing a Dogecoin… That is not what this is,” he said, in reference to Mogul.
Bankruptcy to crypto
When he spoke with Fortune on Tuesday, Spikes was attending a crypto conference in Dubai, where he visited an expansive movie theater in a mammoth mall. He chose to watch the Ben Affleck blockbuster The Accountant 2. “Every time I put boots on the ground in a city,” he said, “I go to the movies.”
More than a decade ago, Spikes raised $1 million to launch MoviePass, which initially charged users around $30 a month. In 2017, Helios and Matheson, a publicly traded data analytics company, acquired a majority stake in the startup and led the $9.95-per-month promotion push that eventually sank the company. Spikes was soon pushed out from the board and “informed he was no longer needed,” according to Time.
Less than two years later, MoviePass went out of business and its publicly traded parent company declared bankruptcy. In 2022, Spikes bought the company back for $140,000. “I knew I could build something again,” he said shortly after the relaunch. (In January, one of Helios and Matheson’s executives pleaded guilty to securities fraud.)
As he’s worked on MoviePass 2.0 over the past three years, Spikes looked for new funding and found willing investors—in crypto.
Animoca Brands, a longtime crypto powerhouse with a focus on NFTs, led a $5 million seed round in MoviePass in 2023, and Mysten Labs, the main company behind the Sui blockchain, led a $15 million round shortly afterwards. Both raises were for equity and token warrants, or promises of a yet-to-be-released cryptocurrency, Spikes said.
“There’s two kinds of businesses that are gaining traction right now,” he told Fortune. “Either you’re an AI play, or you’re a blockchain or crypto play.”
Spikes decided on blockchain. He owns an expensive anime-inspired NFT, holds Bitcoin and Ethereum, and has traveled to Hong Kong, Singapore, and Denver to attend crypto conferences. “I think that blockchain and virtual reality are going to be an amazing force together,” he proclaimed.
MoviePass’s blockchain play, though, is just one part of its business. Subscribers can still pay for a monthly pass, but it’s not a steal at $9.95 a month for a movie a day. Instead, a “premium” pass costs $40 for up to five movies a month. That may mean less customers, but at least, Spikes said, MoviePass is now profitable.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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