The Drama of MoviePass, MovieCrash Could Carry a Real Movie, So Let's Just Cast One

Late in HBO’s MoviePass, MovieCrash documentary, one of the talking heads — a smarmy vulture capitalist who gets way too much glee from describing the downfall of less-savvy vultures — quips that former MoviePass executive Ted Farnsworth is a con artist who had no intention of finding a business model for the once-beloved movie ticket subscription platform that actually made sense. Instead, the smarmy man says, he was putting on a Broadway play, with stocks in place of tickets, with everything about MoviePass being done in the service of the show. 

It’s an interesting metaphor, one that only the smarmiest of men could argue is unique to MoviePass and doesn’t apply to every single company that has been co-opted and corrupted by inhuman hedge fund monsters like Ted Farnsworth, but why stop at the metaphor? The story of MoviePass, as told in the documentary, is so thrilling and twisty that it could work as a prestigious, awards-baiting HBO original film. And to make things even easier on HBO, we’ve gone ahead and figured out all of the important casting already.

Michael Keaton as Mitch Lowe, MoviePass CEO

Mitch Lowe gets the spotlight in the early part of MoviePass, MovieCrash, and our hypothetical dramatization would follow suit for one simple reason: Mitch Lowe comes across as a bit of a bastard who weaponizes his likability, and it’s interesting to see that shift happen. So we’d cast Michael Keaton, who not only bears a passing resemblance to Lowe but also happens to be one of Earth’s most likable humans. Lowe is introduced in the doc as a visionary who truly believes in the potential of MoviePass, a service that allowed customers to pay a flat monthly fee in order to see as many movies as they wanted to, and he was even a co-founder of Netflix.

But Keaton could stretch his legs and have some fun with Lowe’s dark turn, where we find out that he didn’t create MoviePass, that his role in co-founding Netflix had more to do with his access to DVDs than any real vision, and that his folksy “gosh, I just love movies” attitude was a mask to disguise his more craven greediness. He’d even get a big villain moment straight from the doc, akin to Keaton’s great car ride scene in Spider-Man: Homecoming, where employees ask why all the executives are partying at Coachella when a skeleton crew at the office is actually trying to keep the company running. His response: “Not all roles get to party.” Imagine Keaton giving an acid-spitting grin while saying that to some harried customer service rep struggling to make rent. Chilling!

Keegan-Michael Key as Stacy Spikes, actual MoviePass co-founder

The doc cleverly doesn’t center its narrative around the actual duo behind MoviePass until a bit further in, allowing the “twist” of Mitch Lowe’s real loyalties ($$$) to breathe, but the story of MoviePass is really the story of Stacy Spikes, a once-aspiring actor and member of a Rush cover band (only worth mentioning because it’s so cool) who then worked with Boyz II Men at Motown Records and founded the Urbanworld Film Festival. With another entrepreneur named Hamet Watt, Spikes developed the original MoviePass concept and built it on top of AMC’s existing ticket-buying platform. The theater chain freaked out, though, prompting Spikes to work with engineers to come up with the now-familiar system of using a location-based app tied to a credit card to circumvent the theater itself. 

Spikes and Watt eventually got forced out of MoviePass as the company’s growth began to exceed even their wildest expectations, with Lowe taking over as CEO and bumping Spikes down to COO before booting him and Watt entirely. In the doc, Spikes compares his attitude at this point to the iconic “Anger Translator” sketch from Key & Peele, with him putting on a polite face to Lowe and the other white men taking over his company because he really wanted MoviePass to succeed, while he was actually furious on the inside. So why not let the actual Anger Translator guy play Spikes?

Sterling K. Brown as Hamet Watt, the other MoviePass co-founder

There’s a scene in NBC’s This Is Us where Sterling K. Brown’s character quits his job with a short, quiet monologue about honoring his recently deceased father’s legacy. Watt, who wasn’t directly involved in the day-to-say business of MoviePass, doesn’t get such a cathartic moment in the doc, but that is the general soft-spoken vibe he gives off in his interviews — like he’s smart enough to know that this whole operation is going to collapse without him and Spikes (it did), but he’s polite enough to step aside and let these incompetent old white men shoot themselves in their feet over and over again if that’s what they want.

Also, maybe Hamet Watt should get a nice cathartic moment? He and Spikes retained their stock in the company when they got fired, which they say in the doc was valued at something like $80 million at the time, but they weren’t allowed to sell it right away. In the time between then and when they were allowed to offload their shares, the value apparently went down to “pennies.” They really did get screwed, and a “the bad guys get investigated by the FTC” ending isn’t really going to get the audience pumping their fists.

Ed Harris as Ted Farnsworth, Helios And Matheson CEO

In its bid to raise more and more money and grow its user base as quickly as possible, MoviePass became a subsidiary of boring analytics company Helios And Matheson (which is quietly backed by a hedge fund with seemingly bottomless pockets and an insatiable desire to try and empty those pockets in Ted Farnsworth’s direction). In the doc, Farnsworth is the guy credited with slapping the MoviePass name on increasingly stupid things, like a star-studded Coachella party, a MoviePass-branded helicopter, the MoviePass chalet at the Sundance Film Festival (with a ton of MoviePass pillows, for some reason), and — of course — MoviePass Ventures, the deranged movie studio that released John Travolta’s execrable Gotti.

By most accounts, all of that happened because Farnsworth wanted to go to parties, have a helicopter, and be able to tell people that he was a movie producer. He doesn’t appear in the doc, except in stories about him shrugging off any real executive responsibilities so he could meet with famous people, and in archival footage of him… shrugging off responsibilities so he could meet with famous people, but it seems clear that he’s The Villain in this (or at least this interpretation of the events, if you want to be generous).

There’s some intentional incongruity with hypothetically casting Ed Harris (a friend to HBO already from his phenomenal work on the phenomenal Westworld) as a party dude, but that really is the impression that Farnsworth gives off. He’s just an old, bald white man who thinks he can fit in with the glitterati through sheer force of will. And he managed to do it for a while, god bless him (or maybe not god). Watt also notes in the doc that white men with white hair love giving their money to other white men with white hair, and it would be a funny illustration of that if the guy that investors found more trustworthy than Watt ended up being played by famously off-putting creep Ed Harris (we mean that in a nice way).

Some famous young people as the MoviePass employees

MoviePass, MovieCrash makes the logistically understandable — if narratively somewhat dull — decision to spend a lot of time talking to former MoviePass employees who have some interesting insights into the actual operations of the company but don’t have a ton to add about the story of the company. They thought Mitch Lowe was compelling, they recognized that nobody was listening to Stacy Spikes, they also had no idea what Ted Farnsworth was doing with all of the money or where the money was coming from or how the company was ever supposed to make money. Introducing people like that to our dramatization would be a good way to bring in some famous young people.

One of the talking heads is Sydney Weinshel, a former customer service employee at MoviePass. She, or someone filling her role without using her name to make things easier in a legal sense, could be a Sydney Sweeney or Lily-Rose Depp. They’re in the HBO family, like Harris, even if they’re probably too famous for this type of role. But hey, this would be a prestigious HBO original movie and there might be Emmys in this for everybody. Or beef up the role, have more scenes where the character plays off of the executives, and give it to someone like Elisabeth Moss. She could easily get an Emmy for a scene where she confronts Mitch and Ted about how they were partying with John Travolta while the engineers were (allegedly) being told to intentionally break the app so people couldn’t use it to see Mission: Impossible — Fallout (a real tragedy, since that might be the best one). And speaking of John Travolta…

John Travolta as himself as John Gotti

Come on, if you want this hypothetical movie to be a splash, then you’ve gotta make like MoviePass and do some stupid stunts. And what’s a stupider stunt than having John Travolta appear as himself as John Gotti? He could appear in an opening scene where he breaks the fourth wall and directly addresses the viewer: “Lemme tell ya summum. MoviePass wuz the greatest idear in the f*ckin’ world.” That may dash our Emmy dreams, but it would be a lot of fun. And if we’re already embracing the MoviePass ethos and going to bankruptcy anyway, we might as well have some fun on the way down. 

MoviePass, MovieCrash premieres May 29 at 9:00 P.M. ET on HBO and Max. Join the discussion about the documentary in our forums.

Sam Barsanti has written about pop culture for 10 years. He canonically exists in the Arrowverse.