- MoviePass will be available at Walmart, several sources familiar with the deal told Insider.
- MoviePass relaunched last year in beta form and plans to be available to all customers by the summer.
MoviePass is teaming up with Walmart.
The movie-ticket-subscription service that $4 will soon be available at one of the biggest retailers in the world, Insider has learned from several sources familiar with the deal.
MoviePass will have displays in Walmart stores across the country where its subscription cards will be available for shoppers, sources said.
No details were given to Insider about what the offer on the MoviePass Walmart cards will be, or when the cards will be available in stores.
MoviePass declined to comment. Walmart did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider.
Currently, Walmart has $4 where it offers gift cards to the streaming service as well as merchandise tied to its popular shows like "Stranger Things" and "Wednesday."
Walmart, on top of being a major seller of Hollywood merchandise from plush toys to action figures, is looking to be a supporter of the movie-theater experience with the MoviePass deal, one source said.
"This is a huge win for MoviePass and for the theatrical movie business," Comscore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian told Insider. "It signals that the big screen experience of the movie theater has no equal, even with the virtually unlimited availability of filmed content at home on the countless TV's, computers, and other small screen devices sold by Walmart itself."
In November 2021, MoviePass cofounder Stacy Spikes $4 after the startup went $4. Over Labor Day last year, the company relaunched in select cities in beta form. Within the last few months, it has been made available nationwide to people who signed up on a waiting list. Spikes $4 that he planned to make the service available to the general public by the summer and also feature an unlimited option.Spikes $4 with Hamet Watt in 2011, creating a service that let moviegoers see a certain number of movies each month in theaters for a monthly fee. After struggling to stay afloat for years, the company in 2017 was bought by Helios and Matheson Analytics (HMNY).
Under the leadership of former HMNY CEO Ted Farnsworth and then-MoviePass-CEO Mitch Lowe, the company launched a $10-per-month subscription plan that let members see a movie a day. Within two days, subscriptions went from 20,000 to 100,000. In less than a year, MoviePass had over 3 million subscribers.
With Farnsworth and Lowe at the helm, MoviePass blew through hundreds of millions of dollars, and Spikes — who said he'd raised concerns internally about the sustainability of the $10 price point — was fired in 2018.HMNY was $4 and both MoviePass and HMNY filed $4. Farnsworth and Lowe have been $4 by the Department of Justice, which alleges they "engaged in a scheme to defraud investors through materially false and misleading representations relating to HMNY and MoviePass's business and operations to artificially inflate the price of HMNY's stock and attract new investors."