Study: 82% of MoviePass users go to movies they’d otherwise skip

Netflix has ushered in a golden age of watching 25 minutes of a movie and then abandoning it forever. Long gone is the age where you’d wander around Blockbuster with your family, carefully arrive at a consensus choice and then ride it out, come what may. The ability to stream from a seemingly infinite library has given risk-averse movie buffs the leeway to be less selective. Hey, who knows, maybe Curse of Chucky is secretly great? I mean, it isn’t, but now it takes minimal time, effort, and dollars to find out for certain.

According to a new study, the subscription-based movie ticketing service MoviePass is now beginning to bring a similar sensibility to the cinema.

Digital streaming service news hub Exstreamist recently revealed that 82% of MoviePass users, on average, have gone to movies that they would not be willing to pay for directly. The study surveyed 1,311 current self-reporting MoviePass subscribers in conducting this research.

“I’m pretty sure the only reason Hurricane Heist made it to theaters is because MoviePass existed and the studio was like, yeah, someone will show up to watch this,” one of the subscribers explained. “Still, I love bad movies. There’s no way I would have paid to see this in theaters, but I definitely would have rented it or something.”

Much to Steven Spielberg’s chagrin, the Netflixication of movie theaters appears to be underway.