AMC’s Ticket Subscription Plan Surges as MoviePass Falters

After launching seven weeks ago, AMC Theatres’ rival ticket-subscription program to MoviePass accounts for five percent of all attendance at the country’s largest movie chain. Put another way, that means one million moviegoers.

AMC’s Stubs A-List allows patrons to see up to three movies a week in any format, including Imax, for $19.95 a month.

The theater circuit on Thursday also announced that the number of subscribers in the program jumped from 175,000 on July 31 to 260,000 as of this week. That includes 85,000 enrollments in the last two weeks, just as MoviePass raised its price from $9.95 to $14.95 a month and limited the number of films a person can see to three titles monthly.

And just as AMC announced its news on Thursday, MoviePass imposed further restrictions on users by making only six movies available at a time. On Tuesday, MoviePass parent Helios and Matheson Analytics posted a staggering quarterly loss just as a class-action lawsuit was made public as shareholders seek some compensation after watching the value of their stock sink 99 percent in less than a month.

In terms of the amount of business that AMC’s monthly service brings in, actual subscribers account for 4 percent of the chain’s weekly attendance. But because the subscription program allows full-ticket prices to be bought during the reservation process, AMC reports that the overall figure is actually 5 percent.

Stubs is targeting 500,000 subscribers by the end of June 2019 and 1 million by the end of June 2020. The exhibitor says the initial response makes those targets easily achievable.