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 Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg 
 
 As movie theaters struggle with tepid sales, Mitch Lowe has an extreme proposal for how to get more people into seats: Let them come to all the showings they want for about the price of a single ticket each month. 
 
 Lowe, an early Netflix Inc. executive who now runs a startup called MoviePass, plans to drop the price of the company’s movie ticket subscriptions on Tuesday to $9.95. The fee will let customers get in to one showing every day at any theater in the U.S. that accepts debit cards. MoviePass will pay theaters the full price of each ticket used by subscribers, excluding 3D or Imax screens. 
 
 MoviePass could lose a lot of money subsidizing people’s movie habits. So the company also raised cash on Tuesday by selling a majority stake to Helios and Matheson Analytics Inc., a small, publicly traded data firm in New York. The companies declined to comment on terms of the financing but said MoviePass intends to hold an initial public offering by March. Helios and Metheson shares rose 5.7 percent to $2.95 at the close Tuesday in New York. 
 
 Ted Farnsworth, chief executive officer at Helios and Matheson, said the goal is to amass a large base of customers and collect data on viewing behaviors. That information could then be used to eventually target advertisements or other marketing materials to subscribers. “It’s no different than Facebook or Google,” Farnsworth said. “The more we understand our fans, the more we can target them.” 
 
 Theater operators should certainly welcome any effort to increase sales. The top four cinema operators, led by AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., lost $1.3 billion in market value early this month after a disappointing summer. The number of tickets sold in the U.S. and Canada last year declined slightly, while box office revenue rose just 2 percent thanks to pricier tickets, according to the Motion Picture Association of America, a trade group. The cost of a ticket has almost doubled in the last two decades, according to the website Box Office Mojo. The average price is about $8.89 this year, though it can be much higher in some cities. 
 
 
 
 Shares of theater companies fell Tuesday on concerns that MoviePass’s pricing would hurt studios or exhibitors. AMC’s stock declined 2.6 percent to $13.25 at the close. 
 
 
 
 Investors may be misinterpreting the MoviePass business model, Eric Wold, an analyst at B Riley & Co. wrote in a note to clients. If MoviePass can drive more people to theaters that would benefit the exhibitors, although the overall impact is “more negligible than anything,” Wold wrote. 
 
 MoviePass was founded in 2011, originally with a business model similar to a gym membership. The company hoped to turn profit from subscribers who paid $30 or more per month but didn’t use the service often enough to justify the cost. Lowe, a fixture of the home video business who helped get Netflix off the ground and served as president of rental-kiosk operator Redbox, was named CEO last year. The privately held company declined to disclose subscriber numbers or financial information. Lowe said the data-based business model is still “years in the future.” 
 
 With the new strategy, MoviePass hopes to resolve what Lowe sees as the biggest factor to blame for the theater industry’s decline. He said the high price of tickets, not competition from Netflix or Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime Video service, is a big part of what’s keeping people away. “People really do want to go more often,” Lowe said. “They just don’t like the transaction.” ||||| If American movie-theater owners have been super hardcore about one thing, it’s ticket prices. No matter what the Europeans and Canadians do, no matter how many startups try to hack into ticket pricing, exhibitors for years have refused to budge. 
 
 Until now. 
 
 The National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO) announced Tuesday that it’s launching an off-night ticket-discount experiment sometime this year. But rather than dive in, they’re carefully dipping a toe: Only one state, which hasn't yet been revealed, will host the program, and it will run only for a limited time. 
 
 See also: 8 Top Apps and Services for Streaming Your Favorite Movies 
 
 It's hardly a full-scale ticket-price surrender, but it’s still a notable concession. Theaters have been uniformly steadfast in their stance against ticket discounting; they’re fine to honor coupons and membership points for popcorn and Junior Mints, but if the sign on the box office says $14.95, it’s gonna be $14.95, from sea to shining sea. 
 
 That’s largely because studios are promised a hard cut of each ticket; any discount would slice directly into the theaters’ take. Startups like Groupon and MoviePass, which set out to offer unlimited moviegoing for $50 a month, have tried to break through. But they’ve had only limited success, largely withering in the face of intense exhibitor and studio pressure. 
 
 NATO Chief John Fithian announced the plan at CinemaCon in Las Vegas, where hundreds of movie-theater owners — from major chains like AMC to mom-and-pop venues — rub elbows with the Hollywood studios’ elite once a year. But what’s meant to be a love-fest has, in recent years, become an incubator for tension. Issues of shrinking theatrical windows (the period of time between opening day and digital homevideo release), studios’ secret premium VOD — and now discounting — have clouded the air at Caesar’s Palace. 
 
 Fithian stressed that exhibitors in other countries have buoyed their bottom lines with weeknight discounts, but Hollywood has held fast to the old chestnut that doing so devalues movie tickets across the board. Let people spin the turnstiles for six or eight bucks on Tuesday, the thinking goes, and they’ll be less likely to pay $15 or more on Friday. 
 
 Box-office grosses seem to soar to new heights year after year, but actual ticket sales have been flat or in slight decline, with ticket prices and premium formats (3D and IMAX) inflating revenues. 
 
 Though the exhibition community likes to repeatedly say the sky’s not falling, it looks like some are ready to at least get out their umbrellas. ||||| AMC Theatres is threatening legal action against MoviePass, a subscription-based service for cinema-goers, hours after the company announced it will allow customers to see a movie a day for less than $10 a month. 
 
 In a statement, the world’s largest exhibitor dismissed MoviePass as “a small fringe player” and said that its model “is not in the best interest of moviegoers, movie theatres and movie studios.” 
 
 AMC’s stock has been hit hard in recent weeks after it released disappointing quarterly earnings and lowered its projections for 2017. The summer box office is in a slump and a stream of film flops have dragged down exhibition stocks. Shares of AMC took a beating again on Tuesday following MoviePass’ pricing announcement — the company’s stock ended the day down 2.57% at $13.25. 
 
 MoviePass didn’t just unveil a new pricing plan on Tuesday. It also announced that had sold a majority stake to Helios and Matheson Analytics Inc., a publicly traded data firm, for an undisclosed price. 
 
 Since it was founded in 2011, MoviePass has roiled exhibitors, who have engaged in legal action at various points to try to stop its development. 
 
 Related What Is MoviePass? The Pros and Cons of $10-a-Month Unlimited Films 
 
 In an interview with Variety, MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe said the deal has yet to close, but expressed concern that AMC’s stance could hurt his business. 
 
 “I’m not worried about it killing the sale,” he said. “What I’m worried about is it confusing customers and making them believe they can’t use this service at AMC theaters.” 
 
 MoviePass is using the capital injection from the sale to fund an overhaul to its pricing model. It will now enable customers to see a movie a day in a theater for a $9.95 monthly fee, far less than the cost of a ticket in many major markets. 
 
 MoviePass re-sells the tickets to customers and purchases them at full price using a MasterCard debit card. It claims it boosts attendance by 111% and that its customers buy more concessions. But exhibitors have preferred to bolster their own loyalty programs instead of aligning themselves with the service. For instance, AMC has invested heavily in growing its Stubs rewards program. 
 
 In the statement, AMC said it is consulting with its attorneys to determine if or how it can prevent a subscription program offered by MoviePass from being used at its locations. It questioned the longterm viability of MoviePass’ model, noting that the average ticket price for watching a movie at AMC Theatres in the most recent financial quarter was $9.33. 
 
 “From what we can tell, by definition and absent some other form of other compensation, MoviePass will be losing money on every subscriber seeing two movies or more in a month,” AMC’s statement reads. 
 
 Lowe acknowledges that his company is subsidizing ticket buyers and will lose money in the process. However, he believes that MoviePass will be able to prove its value to movie theaters and studios, and that in the future they will cut the company in on their additional profits. Theater owners could also either pay MoviePass back with advertising or give them a percentage of the concessions sales. 
 
 “There must be some way to make us whole,” said Lowe. “We know we have to prove the value we deliver and, at that point in time, where we’re delivering value to studios and theaters, we can work together with them in a constructive manner so that everybody makes more money.” 
 
 At one point, AMC and MoviePass had worked in concert with each other. In 2015, the companies partnered on a pilot program in select markets. Ironically, MoviePass uses data from that initiative to support its claims that it bolsters concessions sales and attendance. In the ensuing years, AMC has gone from ally to foe. On Tuesday, it was withering in its dismissal of MoviePass’ ambitions. 
 
 In the statement, it said “that it is not yet known how to turn lead into gold,” adding, “In AMC’s view, that price level is unsustainable and only sets up consumers for ultimate disappointment down the road if or when the product can no longer be fulfilled.” 
 
 The company said that reducing pricing to accommodate the MoviePass model would negatively impact the customer experience and would leave them unable to “operate quality theaters.” It went on to suggest that the MoviePass model would have a chilling effect on the creative community by cutting them out of the income they receive from movie theaters. 
 
 “While AMC is not opposed to subscription programs generally, the one envisioned by MoviePass is not one AMC can embrace,” the company’s statement reads. “We are actively working now to determine whether it may be feasible to opt out and not participate in this shaky and unsustainable program.” 
 
 Lowe, a co-founder of Netflix and the former head of Redbox, compared AMC’s reaction to the blowback those home entertainment companies received from movie studios and video rental chains when they offered DVDs by mail or via kiosks. 
 
 “This is so much like Blockbuster was when we rolled out Netflix or Redbox,” said Lowe. “It’s the big guy being afraid of the little guy offering better value to consumers.”
– Got a free weeknight? Going to the movies may soon become a more affordable option. Last year, US movie theaters sold 1.34 billion tickets, down 1.5% from the year before. And ticket sales dropped 11% between 2004 and 2013, the Motion Picture Association of America reported yesterday. To combat the trend, theaters are mulling a coordinated move: They may drop ticket prices on one weeknight a week, the Wall Street Journal reports. The National Association of Theatre Owners plans to try it out in one state this year. Which night will be cheap night isn't yet clear. The move would run counter to theaters' current habit of raising prices each year—a trend which has resulted in higher revenues despite lower ticket sales. Last year, for instance, the average ticket price was $8.13, up from $7.96 in 2012. Box-office sales, meanwhile, hit $10.9 billion, compared to $10.8 billion in 2012. The cheap-day system "has worked for years in Latin America and Canada," says theater owners association head John Fithian, per Deadline. Studios will have to agree to the plan, he notes—and the industry has feared that lowering prices one day a week will lead to people opting not to pay the higher weekend price, Mashable points out.