Cinephiles talk about the “MoviePass summer” with the same wistful nostalgia as hippies recalling the Summer of Love, like it’s an impossible dream so utopian that it might have been a collective hallucination. In August 2017, the startup MoviePass – a company conceived to sell subscriptions under which users paid a monthly fee in exchange for movie tickets – announced a radical new pricing structure offering one admission a day for a paltry $9.95 each month. Moviegoers immediately realized that the service would pay for itself within a single use, and use it they did; attendance soared, particularly in metropolitan markets with robust repertory scenes, where obsessives enthusiastically accepted the implicit challenge to go to the pictures every day. It was all Monopoly money anyway, not even real, or at least not real to the average consumer. Squaring the balance would be someone else’s problem.

Said problem metastasized into a full-blown quagmire as MoviePass racked up hundreds of millions in debt and scrambled to stave off the inevitable collapse fast approaching. New costs and throttled access came at increasingly regular intervals, notifying customers that they could only watch a certain handful of titles, or at specific times. Glitches proliferated and some showtimes simply vanished from availability, to the point that anyone with a brain surmised that management was frantically trying to jam a cork in the sinking ship. In 2019, an email blast informed subscribers that MoviePass would cease operations imminently, sealing the final failure of a company that now seems success-proof in its very premise.

In association with Unrealistic Ideas for HBO Documentaries, MoviePass, MovieCrash chronicles the origin story, meteoric rise and stranger-than-fiction implosion of the theatrical movie subscription app, MoviePass, as told through the eyes of the visionary co-founders. The film details the unique challenges they faced in building the pop culture phenomenon, only to eventually find themselves cast aside, watching from the sidelines, as new executives seized control. The unveiling of the mind-boggling $9.95 plan came at the same time that MoviePass got in bed with big money, as an imminent need to grow its subscriber base motivated the deal with HMNY and the instatement of its CEO, Ted Farnsworth, in a key decision-making position. Along with the former Netflix executive Mitch Lowe, they wrested control of MoviePass from Spikes and Watt to enter a new era of profligate spending. Proving yet again, the illustration of how the racialized perception of the typical CEO – a hyper-confident, older white man – can be fatal when used as cover for bush-league incompetence while cleverer, harder-working colleagues continue to labor in obscurity.