MoviePass Secures $100 Million Capital Investment From Global Emerging Markets to Develop Fantasy Box Office Game Mogul (EXCLUSIVE)
Summary
MoviePass has secured a $100 million capital investment from Global Emerging Markets to accelerate the development of Mogul, a new fantasy gaming platform that the company launched this month.The game, which is in beta mode, allows people to predict box office results, per screen averages, sentiment scores and awards success for films, while assuming the role of a studio executive. The company currently has a waiting list of 400,000 people and expects to have 200,000 users by the end of May.Were letting people enter in waves in order to not completely overwhelm the system, Spikes said.The investment from Global Emerging Markets comes in the form of a flexible capital commitment that MoviePass can draw upon as needed to scale Mogul. That model proved to be financially unsustainable, given that it barely covered the cost of a single ticket in a major market like New York or Los Angeles. It was reacquired by Spikes roughly a year later.Spikes wasnt around for the roughest part of MoviePasss story, having been pushed out of the company he helped create shortly after selling a majority stake to Helios and Matheson, which put its founder Ted Farnsworth and Mitch Lowe, a former Netflix and Redbox executive, in charge. The saga was chronicled in the HBO documentary, MoviePass, MovieCrash.Under Spikes leadership, MoviePass received an equity investment in 2024 from Forecast Labs, a consumer venture group that is owned by Comcast.Spikes says Mogul is part of a larger strategy to reanimate the community around moviegoing at a time when streaming has become dominant and the box office has struggled to return to pre-pandemic levels.Weve always been a company built from a fan perspective, he said.