What happened
When a stock has a share price of less than $0.02, it doesn't take much of a move to shift it 10% -- up or down. For that reason, when you learn that today, MoviePass owner Helios and Matheson Analytics (HMNY) stock is down 10.1% as of 12:40 p.m. EDT, you probably shouldn't be surprised.
And yet, a microscopic stock price (it was listed at $0.0189 as of 1:34 p.m. EDT) isn't Helios' only problem today. Turns out, MoviePass subscribers are preparing to abandon the service in droves.
As many as two-thirds of MoviePass members could abandon this sinking ship. Image source: Getty Images.
So what
That's the upshot of a new poll in The Hollywood Reporter, which says that over the past four months, the number of MoviePass subscribers who say they're "very satisfied" with the service has plummeted 35 percentage points (from 83% to just 48%).
Among the survey's other revelations, only 44% of the company's subscribers still "strongly" agree that MoviePass is a "a great deal" after the Helios subsidiary recently imposed a raft of new restrictions on its members' ability to see movies. And despite all the company's moves to cut cash burn and save the stock from crashing, 50% of MoviePass members say that they still worry the company "won't last."
Voicing complaints such as "They kept changing the rules" and as a result "I couldn't see the movie I wanted to see when I wanted to see it," 19% of MoviePass subscribers polled had canceled their subscriptions -- and half of those did so within the past turbulent month of continual rule changes. What's more, 47% of those members who've stuck with MoviePass up to this point say they're also now "very or somewhat likely to cancel" their subscriptions.
Now what
Combined with the 19% who've already canceled (an estimate based on the survey), this implies that MoviePass could eventually lose as many as 66% of its once 3.2 million members -- potentially dropping the service to 1 million members or fewer.
While that would certainly mean Helios will lose less money going forward, it would also wipe out the growth story that's long been one of the stock's greatest strengths. No wonder investors are fleeing.
