If you’re as enthused about movies and cinema as I am, then you probably find yourself at the local movie theater a half-dozen or more times each month. Skip the popcorn and soda, aim for the afternoon screenings instead of Friday or Saturday night, and it still adds up pretty darn fast. Still, so many films are far better on the big screen than they are on TV, even with a fancy home theater setup. Movies are designed to be big and loud, with 11-speaker systems or more, so compressing it onto your 38″ HDTV will never offer the same experience.
Enter MoviePass. For a flat $35/month, it lets you see up to 30 movies each month at the movie theater of your choice, even your local cineplex. Heck, even if you only make it to the movies every Saturday evening, that’s still over $50 in movie tickets…
MoviePass is both a credit card (it’s a branded Discover card, if you look closely) and a smartphone app, so you’ll need an iPhone or Android phone for the program to work. When you want to see a movie, you find the movie, theater and correct screening in the app and when you’re close, you check in and the card is activated for the value of a movie ticket.
Let me show you how it works by stepping through purchasing a ticket to go see the rather daft Need for Speed film. First, I need to find the movie playing at the local theater on my iPhone:
10:50am showing at the Century Boulder theater? That’s what I want!
A tap on “Check-In At Theater” and…
Oops. As it says, you need to be pretty darn close to the theater to use the card. I’ve learned to check in as I’m walking up to the box office. Once you are close enough, check in and…
That’s it. The theater doesn’t need to know about any of this complexity, either. I just hand over my bright red MoviePass card and they run it as they would any other credit card. A few seconds later they hand back my MoviePass and the ticket for the film.
Couldn’t be any easier, actually. And for $35/mo, it’s a no-brainer. Even if you only make it to three movies each month, that’s still a savings if the films are $12.50 or higher in your area!
Check it out, sign up for a month and cancel if you don’t find it a great boon for cinephiles. Please use this link: http://movi.ps/1g1wump
A few caveats too: First off, the pass lets you buy a movie ticket every 24 hours. They say “see a movie every 24 hours” but with some advance planning a more literalist approach means you could pick up one Sat date night movie ticket Friday at lunch, then the second on-site, covering two people’s attendance (most theaters I know will sell tickets up to a week in advance).
The second caveat is that it’s good for a standard ticket cost, so if you’re a huge fan of IMAX and 3D movies, this won’t cover those more expensive tickets. However, with some creative thinking you can use your MoviePass to cover the basic cost and just pay the incremental on the higher-priced screenings.
And one more thing: MoviePass has an affiliate program so if you sign up using the link I have in this article, I get a few bucks while you pay the exact same you would if you’d gone straight to their site. So using my link is good, and I say a hearty Thank You!