Why you probably don't want MoviePass

A long-intended review
First, click here for a 2-week free trial; if you love it and experience none of the annoyances I'm about to outline, and if you'll use it enough to save money, by all means go for it--it'll get me a $10 credit.

I signed up in late January, so I've had plenty of time to negotiate the unnecessarily steep learning curve and form an unemotional opinion. And since this weekend I'll achieve a milestone--my per-movie cost using the service will dip below $6 for the first time, and assuming I average 5 uses per month henceforth, it will, barring monthly peeks above the line when the charge hits my credit card--I'm in to stay.

Why MoviePass is more awesome than not for me

1. That's it: cheap movie admissions, nothing else. Though I could add the fact that when I use the card at the Criterion, which is to say virtually every time I've used it these 8+ months, and the vast majority of times I'll ever use it, my Criterion Club card is credited according to the price I'd pay for my ticket, if I were paying for my ticket, thus getting me to my next free admission on that card, thus lowering my overall moviegoing costs even further. But that's just further "cheap." That's it: nothing cool about it, nothing mind-expanding, nothing otherwise pleasurable. Cheap, and ever-cheaper the more you use it, and I use it a lot.

Mitigations of MoviePass's awesomeness, part 1: institutional
When I was told about MoviePass, it sounded magical: pay $30 a month and go to movies free. A better way to put it, I guess, is that it sounded too good to be true. And so I discovered it to be, partly before committing, partly not until I started using it:

1. Before you start paying your $30 a month, you have to pay a $29.99 "initiation fee," so in other words, you start with an extra month's fee to amortize over the coming months. (I actually made a spreadsheet to chart my costs, so I watched my per-movie costs drop from $59.99 to $10, jump back up to $12.86 when my second month's fee came due, then head back down. It dipped under $9 for the first time in early March, under $8 a month later, under $7 shortly after that, and now the $6 barrier is finally about to be breached. But I've used it > 5 times a month on average; most people wouldn't.
2. "Wait," you say, "I read this blog faithfully, and I'm sure Blab goes to more than 5 movies a month." Indeed I do. But I can't use MoviePass for every one. For example, though there was a survey suggesting that they might extend savings to 3D movies, currently those are not covered. Which may not be a big deal to you (personally, I've been to 6 3D flicks since I've had MP), but . . .
3. The service is limited to one film a day. Correction: on the website it used to say you could go to a movie every day, but that was true only if you went to a film with exactly the same showtime every day. Doubtless inundated by complaints of false advertising, they've now corrected that to say one use every 24 hours, meaning that if I use MP to see a Friday postwork flick, as I often do, I can't use it for a Saturday matinee. Since I'm disinclined to go to an evening film, that means that I'm limited to 2 uses on a normal weekend, combining either (1) postwork Friday with Sunday or (2) Saturday with Sunday, making sure that the showtimes are identical or in ascending order. In short, it takes some flexibility out of my itineraries.
4. Oh, one more minor thing: presumably to prevent me from lending out my card so that a friend can see a film I loved, MP can be used only once for any one film.

Mitigations of MoviePass's awesomeness, part 2: logistical
But that's just the rules of the game: more restrictive than I initially imagined, but still, given the frequency I attend movies, well worth the $30 a month plus initiation fee. What irks me is the complications of using MoviePass, some of it by (dumb) design, some of it by crappy soft- and/or hardware. Here's the process I'll follow Saturday or Sunday, when I go see The Trip to Italy at the Criterion:

1. At some point on my walk to the theater, I'll turn on the GPS on my phone and turn off the wifi.
2. I'll load the MP app.
3. I'll select the Criterion from the list of area theaters.
4. I'll select the film and showtime from the theater's list.
5. I'll wait until I'm in the lobby or just a few feet away to click the Check in at the Theater button that appears after step 4.
6. A Checking Location message will appear, and with luck, after a few seconds, a Purchase Your Ticket box will appear.
7. At this point, I can turn off the battery-eating GPS, turn the wifi back on, and close the app.
8. I'm not sure whether the theater's ticket pickup kiosk even works, but because I need to get credit on my club card, I get in the ticket line. (The one time I used the card at another theater, I was able to complete my transaction at the kiosk, though I had to select my film on the screen, rather that automatically imparting that information by swiping my card.)
9. At the ticket counter, I tell the cashier which film I'm seeing and hand her, in addition to my Criterion card, my plastic credit card-esque MoviePass card for her to swipe.
10. She gives me a credit card-esque slip to sign.
11. At long last, I get my actual ticket, yes, for "free."

OK, given that we are said to be living in an age of tech miracles, that seems like a ridiculous number of steps to go through for this automated process (granted, I believe it's the theater, not MP, that requires my signature), but wait! There's more!

1. You're wondering why I have to turn off my wifi, right? Well, it took me a long time to figure it out, but I finally realized that the process was often getting short-circuited by a wifi signal fading in and out; the MP transponder apparently demands a solid signal for several seconds to get the job done. Since I stumbled onto this workaround, my troubles completing the transaction have been much less frequent.
2. Now, when I turn on the GPS and wait a few seconds before loading the app, you'd think it would immediately know exactly where I am, right? But in fact, more often than not, I'm told that there are no theaters in my area and invited to change locations.
3. When that happens, one option for "change" is, oddly, to use my current location. I always try that first, but as often as not, it continues to insist that no, I'm nowhere near the movie theater I'm walking to, or any others. So . . .
4. I then have to type in my friggin' ZIP Code. Which invariably works.
5. After step 4 in the previous list, I'm told to wait until I'm within 100 yards of the theater before continuing. OK, I don't see the point, but that's the rule. Except that I have often been standing in the friggin' lobby before hitting the Check In button and been told that I'm ALMOST THERE!
6. I've only recently discovered that the correct response is to hit Cancel and start over. The intuitive response--backing out to the previous page and trying again--accomplishes nothing; sometimes exiting the apps and starting over does, but sometimes not. This, I remind you, while standing in the lobby of the theater. Several times I've been reduced to . . .
7. calling tech support, which generally goes pretty quickly, and they're able to push buttons in their remote location that get me through step 8 above--except, that is, for the times I've gone to an 11am film and there was no one at tech support. Fortunately, in those cases I was finally able to get the damn thing to work.

So is it worth it for me, somebody who sees enough films to get his per-flick cost below $6, and who also has a fairly high threshold for violent response to frustration? Absolutely. Is it worth it for you? Well, if you see 4 films a month at $12 a pop and have a moderately high frustration threshold, I'd say yeah, probably. But if you see 3 films a month and have a low frustration threshold, I doubt that the savings will be worth the annoyance.

Want two weeks free to compare my experience with your own? Click here. But don't say I didn't warn you.