I know what happened, I just want to hear them say it out loud

Max has released a trailer for his MoviePass documentary, MovieCrash, coming to the streaming service on May 29. And frankly, it looks awful. The trailer makes the film look like the worst kind of bubbly, hyperbolic TV news report, full of over-the-top voiceover, staccato soundbites and sensationalized quotes, all trying to inject riffy, bouncy energy into a story that doesn't need polishing. The actual document may not be like this; trailers are notoriously unreliable at reflecting what a movie is actually like. But anyway, I don't care. I'm in, for one reason: I just want to see the faces of the people behind the story I followed with absolutely unceasing disbelief for two whole years of "Oh God, what now?" damage pleasure.

MoviePass existed for six years as a largely under-the-radar, somewhat expensive movie ticket subscription service before being acquired by analytics firm Helios and Matheson. In 2017, the revamped company introduced an unbeatable subscription service: Members could get unlimited movie tickets for about $10 a month. "How could this business model work?" asked industry observers at the time. The answer: It couldn't. Helios and Matheson lost hundreds of millions of dollars on the project, while visibly, awkwardly, and very publicly trying to redefine the company's intentions every few weeks.

While all this was happening, I was the film editor at The Verge, and we reported on every new beat in the story as it happened, because our readers loved to know what new nonsense MoviePass was up to. What made the story so fascinating and engaging was how utterly clear it was that Helios and Matheson knew nothing about the industry it was trying to disrupt, and how quickly it kept changing the narrative of what MoviePass was meant to do.