When MoviePass launched in 2011, the subscription film ticketing service seemed like a dream for movie lovers. But for investors, it quickly turned into a nightmare.
When documentary filmmaker Muta’Ali set out to tell that tale, he wanted to center the overlooked story of Stacy Spikes and Hamet Watt, the two Black founders of MoviePass — and how their business got taken over by former president of Redbox Mitch Lowe and financier Ted Farnsworth, who subsequently tanked their company and got in trouble with the law.
“The failure was so extreme that in less than a year, the company was driven to the ground and their $80 million in stock value went down to pennies,” says Muta’Ali. “Everything that they had dedicated a decade plus of their life toward, at least financially, was no more.”
Muta’Ali takes us behind the scenes of the making of his HBO documentary Moviepass, Moviecrash.