Ted Farnsworth, the CEO of MoviePass owner Helios & Matheson Analytics, shot down speculation about the company’s future, insisting that bankruptcy isn’t on the table despite months of bad press and service restrictions that have sent the company’s stock price to barely north of a single penny.
“We’re still here, and we’re not going anywhere,” Farnsworth told TheWrap CEO Sharon Waxman on Tuesday during TheGrill and revealed that the company raised an additional $65 million in new funding last month. (He declined to specify the source or terms of the investment.)
“We’re doing M&A, we’re looking at all kinds of acquisitions at any given time and we’ll grow the company that way and I think you’ll see over the next few weeks,” Farnsworth said at the SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills.
MoviePass and Helios & Matheson have had a tumultuous summer, as the company’s stock has declined more than 99 percent in the last three months as the company faced a cash crunch to pay the full price for movie tickets of subscribers eager to make the most of a flat monthly fee that didn’t actually cover the cost of those tickets.
Since August, when the company began restricting subscribers to three movies per month and placed other limits on membership, Farnsworth said that the company had stabilized its spending.
“People are going to less than one movie a month,” Farnsworth said of average subscriber usage, though he offered no detail about how long that has been the case.
“So technically subscription alone right now is doing just fine, now it’s tacking on all the other things on top of it,” he said, noting the potential to find revenue from the co-acquisition of indie movies as well as advertising and marketing opportunities toward subscribers. “What we’re doing now is we’re proving out our model.”
While MoviePass is finding its way to sustainability and profitability, Farnsworth’s fellow panelist, Atom Tickets co-founder and chairman Matt Bakal, indicated that his online movie ticketing service could be up on the block.
“I think over time we’re an important puzzle piece,” Bakal said, noting that rival Fandango is a valuable division of Comcast. “We’re growing a business and that business has a lot of potential places it can go.”