MoviePass, a movie-theater subscription service that emerged from bankruptcy with its original founders at the helm, has received an equity investment fromForecast Labs, a consumer venture group that is owned by Comcast. As part of the investment, Forecast Labs will drive new customer acquisition for MoviePass through TV advertising.Comcast also owns and operates NBCUniversal. MoviePass did not reveal financial details of the investment or its structure.
MoviePass recently announced that it had been responsible for a million movies seen on its platform and also said that it had achieved thefirst profitable year in the company’s history. The service is rebounding after a turbulent period in its history. MoviePass became a phenomenon after it introduced a $9.95 monthly membership plan in 2017 that seemed too good to be true. That was the problem for the service, which couldn’t figure out a way to make it profitable and filed for Chapter 11 in 2020. It was reacquired by co-founder Stacy Spikes roughly a year later. Spikes was pushed out of the company he helped create shortly after selling a majority stake to Helios and Matheson, which put its founder Ted Farnsworth and Mitch Lowe, a former Netflix and Redbox executive, in charge. MoviePass’ rise, fall and reemergence was recently the subject of an HBO documentary, “MoviePass, MovieCrash.”
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