MoviePass had its first profitable year ever in 2023, its CEO says

• MoviePass turned profitable for the first time in 2023, CEO Stacy Spikes told Business Insider.
• Spikes revived the service after a 2020 bankruptcy.

MoviePass has turned a profit.

That's a big milestone for any startup, but doubly so for MoviePass. The movie-ticket-subscription service had become the butt of jokes for a couple of years when it famously dropped its monthly price to an unsustainable $10 a month in 2017, which .

But after relaunching in 2022, the service ran a profit for the first time in its history in 2023, company cofounder and CEO Stacy Spikes told Business Insider exclusively.

Though the company will not publicly release specifics about what it earned last year, BI confirmed the numbers by viewing internal data.

Following the 2020 bankruptcy of MoviePass at the hands of then-CEO Mitch Lowe and Ted Farnsworth, the CEO of the app's parent company Helios and Matheson Analytics (both of whom are awaiting trial on charges of securities fraud), Spikes bought back the company in November 2021 and then relaunched MoviePass in a beta version over Labor Day 2022.

Since then, MoviePass has surpassed 1 million movies seen in theaters through the app, according to the company.

The latest version of MoviePass has found success by giving users credits to see movies each month (which roll over to subsequent months), as opposed to the previous versions that allowed users to see a certain number of movies a month.

MoviePass said its new model has resulted in subscribers saving 35% on the cost of going to the movies (versus paying the retail price at the theater) since the beta launch, and has increased midweek attendance at movie theaters by 50% among its subscribers.

MoviePass' rise and fall (and relaunch) is the subject of an upcoming documentary, "" which is based on . It will have its world premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March.