The CEO of MoviePass' parent company has stepped down and is trying to buy the movie-ticket subscription service, which shut down Saturday
- Ted Farnsworth has stepped down as the CEO of Helios and Matheson Analytics, MoviePass' parent company.
- On Tuesday, the company announced that Farnsworth had submitted an offer to purchase MoviePass and other assets owned by Helios and Matheson, including MoviePass Film and Moviefone.
- Financial terms of the offer were not disclosed.
- During Farnsworth's time as CEO of Helios and Matheson, he spent hundreds of millions to try to keep MoviePass afloat.
- As MoviePass struggled, Helios and Matheson's stock crash, and the company was delisted from the Nasdaq in February.
- MoviePass shut down on Saturday.
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Ted Farnsworth has stepped down as CEO of Helios and Matheson Analytics so he can go all in on MoviePass.
In a release sent out on Tuesday, the company announced that Farnsworth had submitted an offer to purchase MoviePass and other assets owned by Helios and Matheson, including MoviePass Films and Moviefone. Financial terms of the offer were not disclosed.
Farnsworth stepped down as CEO and from the board of directors to submit the offer, which would need board approval to move forward.
Farnsworth came on as the CEO of Helios and Matheson in 2017 and took a controlling stake in MoviePass that July. In August of that year, MoviePass drastically dropped its monthly subscription price - from $50 per month to $10 - to see a movie per day in theaters. This led to a huge boost in subscribers, but also massive losses that stretched into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Read more: If you're laughing at the death of MoviePass, you probably aren't paying close enough attention
Helios and Matheson covered those losses primarily by selling new shares of its Nasdaq-listed stock. The share price crashed and Helios and Matheson was kicked off the Nasdaq in February after trading under $1 per share for months.
On Saturday, MoviePass shut down because of a lack of financing.
"Despite the reams of pulp fiction that have been written about MoviePass, we know what went wrong along the way and the many things that went right, " Farnsworth said in the release that went out on Tuesday. "After all, we built the fastest growing subscription business in the history of merchandising and numerous copycats are out there now trying to capitalize on our model in the theater industry."
Since the initial rise of MoviePass, the three biggest chains in the country - AMC, Regal, and Cinemark - have all launched movie-ticket subscription services.