'MoviePass, MovieCrash' highlights forgotten black founders Stacy Spikes and Hamet Watt
MoviePass took a decade to create by 2011, but only two years for new leadership to kick the founders out and ruin the business
If you invited me to see a film in a movie theater right now, there’s a 98% chance I’d say “no.” The COVID-19 pandemic made me super comfortable with waiting for a film to hit a streaming platform. But in my teenage years, college years and all the way up until my mid-30s, I was serious about going to a movie theater.
As a kid, going to drive-in movies was a regular family event. In high school, me and my mother just about lived in dollar-value movie theaters. In college, I would head to the neighborhood movie theater just about every week to see whatever was there — usually alone because none of my college friends wanted to see movies anywhere near as much as I did. In my 20s and 30s, roll the dice. I went with family, friends, dates, boyfriends or alone. I didn’t care. I was going to see the latest movie, preferably with someone who didn’t talk my ear off or chew their movie food open-mouthed.
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I used my AMC Stubs Rewards pass nonstop to find a discount wherever I could. I called 777-FILM to hear Moviefone announcements (until 2014) each week, and everything else was planned around that.
For the life of me though, I don’t remember whether I had a MoviePass. I’d heard of the pass, but there were only a handful of people in my social circle who wanted to see a movie once a month, never mind daily. And I had zero knowledge that MoviePass was founded by two black men: Stacy Spikes and Hamet Watt.
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I for sure didn’t know that one of MoviePass’ consultants was Diana Ross’ ex-husband Robert Ellis Silberstein. And social media was nowhere near the online tabloid it is today so nobody I knew was talking about how Spikes was put on “probation,” and both founders were kicked out of their own company in less than a year. (Or, maybe news outlets were so busy covering Trump’s daily antics that I overlooked this altogether between 2016 to 2018.)
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The audacity of latecomers coming in to kick the original founders out would’ve definitely caught my moviegoer attention span! And this 2024 film “MoviePass, MovieCrash” has a lot more business bombs to drop.
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Sadly, if you’re self-employed, a black business owner or a woman business owner, you may already be able to relate to the types of challenges that founders Spikes and Watt went through — even with the jokes about Key & Peele’s Obama Translator. We’ve had to glue our lips shut to keep that Translator in check in the working world for decades.