MoviePass' owner, Helios and Matheson Analytics, has filed for bankruptcy
- MoviePass' owner, Helios and Matheson Analytics, filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy on Wednesday, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
- The company's interim CEO, Parthasarathy Krishnan, and CFO, Robert Damon, tendered their resignations upon filing.
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Helios and Matheson Analytics, the owner of the defunct movie-ticket subscription startup MoviePass, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy on Wednesday, according to a filling with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The company's interim CEO, Parthasarathy Krishnan, and CFO, Robert Damon, tendered their resignations upon filing. The remaining members of the board of directors - Prathap Singh, Gavriel Ralbag, Muralikrishna Gadiyaram, and Joseph Fried - did so as well.
The bankruptcy filing comes four months after the MoviePass service shut down. MoviePass also filed for bankruptcy separately.
Helios and Matheson had lost hundreds of millions of dollars since August of 2017, when it acquired MoviePass and its then-CEO, Ted Farnsworth, dropped the monthly subscription price to see a movie at any theater once a day from $50 a month to $10.
The price change made MoviePass a must-have for movie fans overnight as the company was bombarded with hundreds of thousands of new subscribers. But the company could not find a stable business model, as it had to repay the movie theaters full ticket price on most of the movies its subscribers saw.
The price drop eventually led to downfall of MoviePass - which could never keep up with the demand and, as Business Insider reported in its definitive at the company's rise and fall, went to extreme lengths to keep the company afloat, which several sources said included blocking some subscribers out of their accounts - and Helios and Matheson along with it. The company's stock plummeted and after months of trading below $1, it was delisted from the Nasdaq in February of 2019.
Farnsworth, the mastermind of the $10-a-month plan, stepped down as the CEO of Helios and Matheson soon after MoviePass shut down and submitted an offer to purchase MoviePass and other assets owned by Helios and Matheson, including MoviePass Films and Moviefone.
Helios and Matheson has yet to sell MoviePass or its other assets.