MoviePass Is Betting Big on Entertainment Gambling
Until now, the gay men and pop-culture-obsessed women of the world have been marked safe from the sports-betting addiction that has taken over straight men on their phones. MoviePass would like to change that. MoviePass CEO Stacy Spikes revealed to the Crowd Pleaser newsletter that the company has created and beta tested a new gambling platform for pop culture called Mogul. “We want to build the first true hub for entertainment speculation,” Spikes said. He added that he thinks there’s enough data in the film business to be the next big betting scene. “You can know so much detail and data, and we see the only other place that is as data-rich is sports,” he said. “Well, the closest business that has that level of data that people are predicting and guessing about every Friday is movies.”
Currently, betting on entertainment events like Rotten Tomatoes scores, awards-season results, and box-office outcomes is available on apps like Kalshi but is dwarfed by the sports-betting industry. Betting on box office is banned at the federal level in the U.S. in order to stop studios from betting on their own failure, but betting on streaming and Rotten Tomatoes scores is unregulated. DraftKings has accepted bets on the Oscars since 2019, per ESPN.
Currently, Spikes claims the goal of Mogul is to funnel people into buying MoviePass. He believes that the future of moviegoing is the subscription business. “Hollywood’s problem is not going to theaters or not,” he said. “If you had a subscription business that didn’t require you to bet the farm on Friday night, you’d have a stable world. But what happens is that you don’t have subscribers, so you have to acquire people every single day. You have to acquire those people to come.” And what could get them more involved than betting on on the box office?
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