MoviePass to spin off into separate company to avoid bankruptcy for owner

Not so much demonstrating the service’s value

It’s been all quiet on the MoviePass front for some time—well, except for the New York Attorney General investigation into the company (per Deadline), but what can you do? In the latest installment of the MoviePass Deathwatch Cinematic Universe, the service will have what we’ll call a reboot—in fear of MoviePass’s troubles leading to bankruptcy, the service’s parent company Helios And Matheson (HMNY) is spinning it off into its own entity.

This new company will be called MoviePass Entertainment Holdings, and will be home of the service’s ticketing, film financing, and film production dealings. The spinning off will require the approval of the SEC, the Nasdaq, and the state of Delaware, because of course MoviePass is based there. Here’s what Ted Farnsworth, chairman and CEO of Helios and Matheson and possible Professor Farnsworth from Futurama ancestor had to say:

“Since we acquired control of MoviePass in December 2017, HMNY largely has become synonymous with MoviePass in the public’s eye, leading us to believe that our shareholders and the market perception of HMNY might benefit from separating our movie-related assets from the rest of our company.”

Translation: we don’t want this, broskis.

This is the latest in a long 2018 nightmare saga that has included service crashes, PR damage control, plan changes (and immediate reversals), more service crashes, and the “accidental” reversals of user cancellations. Perhaps your 2018 has sucked, but at least the downward spiral of MoviePass has at least been one source of schadenfreude.

What is surprising to me is that MoviePass still has the temerity to think that they still have the means to produce their own movies, with their aforementioned film production arm “MoviePass Films” still being a very real thing. As a reminder, a crime thriller called 10 Minutes Gone is in production (per Deadline); the movie will follow a bank robber who loses ten minutes of his memory after being hit by a stray bullet during a heist gone wrong attempting to figure out just what happened, all while being pursued by a crime boss played by Willis, who I presume will grumble incoherently during his screentime.

We’ll continue to monitor the ongoing MoviePass saga, but for now, it seems that at least HMNY will live to analyze data another day now that it has jettisoned a ton of garbage.

MoviePass To Be Spun Off By Helios And Matheson Into Separate Company [Deadline]