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MoviePass got a huge influx of new subscribers after dropping prices to $10

MoviePass got a huge influx of new subscribers after dropping prices to $10

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But it’s having trouble dealing with all the new customers

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MoviePass iPhone app

About a week ago, MoviePass announced it was replacing its $15 to $50 tiered subscription plan with a flat fee of $9.95 a month. The price drop generated a lot of interest — so much that MoviePass now says it has already reached its 2018 subscriber goal.

MoviePass, which allows users to see one 2D film per day in certain theaters, now has more than 150,000 subscribers, up from 20,000 last December, Deadline reports. That number comes from the data analytics firm Helios and Matheson, which recently purchased a majority stake in MoviePass.

MoviePass didn’t expect you all to actually want its product

MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe told Deadline that he’s “frankly amazed” at the customer response, hinting that the company wasn’t prepared for this many sign-ups in such a short period of time. Reinforcing that idea is the blog post published yesterday on MoviePass.com, apologizing for website and app crashes, and several days of customer-service delays.

“Though we anticipated a high level of interest, we received an unprecedented volume of traffic,” the post reads. “As many of you know, the massive amount of website and app visits caused our system to crash. These crashes, in turn, significantly increased our incoming correspondence.”

Comments on MoviePass’ Facebook page indicate that some users were still having trouble getting the site to load last night, while others were just excited for the deal to kick in.

While a $10-a-month price point sounds appealing — in cities like New York, that’s already cheaper than the cost of a single movie ticket — MoviePass is likely to run into more roadblocks. The company has already said it expects to lose money until it can work out deals with theater chains, and the theater industry seems hesitant to welcome it. AMC Theaters, which became the largest theater chain in the world last year, has already said it will attempt to block MoviePass users from ticket sales.

As Deadline points out, MoviePass debit cards are issued by Mastercard, which may make them difficult to block. MoviePass recently added a map of participating locations to its website, and it currently includes several AMC theaters.