Did you hear the buzz about Movie Pass relaunching this month? It was all over the Internet. There was a website and everything. It had a countdown. It also had no verifiable contact information. It also had no affiliation with the original owners of Movie Pass. But there it was a shiny new website made for what is being quoted as around $20.00. And boy did people bite on it.
We were aware of it and considered it a curiosity. Now would be a pretty terrible time to launch movie pass again considering that almost no movie theaters are open and almost no new movies are coming out. We even considered that just maybe that it was a future streaming service using the name to attract attention. But in the end we declined to bite o it. And boy are we glad for it.
The website is now running a video showing a pile of the publications highlighting their headlines with a statement reading
“This website was made with around $20, with no purpose other than to fool friends.It was tweeted out by a twitter user who we have no affiliation with, and the media picked it up from there. Some articles claimed this was an ‘official MoviePass website’ which was completely fabricated by those journalists.”
One reason that some people don’t trust the media is the tendency to rush to be first and loud about it and while it is not damaging to anybody when this happens in the entertainment industry it sure does make it look bad. A similar situation unfolded around the rights to Spiderman between Disney and Sony with multiple websites reporting based on a YouTube video from a “creator” with less than a few thousand subscribers and no actual media contacts. But to so many people the rule is as long as you can say you heard it from somewhere you are blameless when your report is full of it.
Unfortunately “I heard about it on the Internet” qualifies as a source for too many people. And look. Anybody can have a website. We look forward to the return of the traditional movie industry but definitely worry that the traditional press is long gone.
