With movie theatres up and running across Canada again, Cineplex is launching a new membership program called CineClub to encourage people to come back to the big screen.
For $9.99 a month, the program offers members one general-admission movie ticket every month – bookable online through the Cineplex website or the smartphone app – and the option to buy additional discounted tickets for other screenings for the same price.
There’s a surcharge if you want to see something in a “premium experience” (such as 3D, IMAX, UltraAVX, or a VIP screening), and special screenings like Cineplex Events aren’t included.
Members will earn Scene points on all CineClub purchases (a Scene membership is required to join the program) and get 20 per cent discounts on concession purchases, food at the Outtakes and VIP lounge and gaming at Cineplex’s Rec Room and Playdium venues. There’s also a 10 per cent discount on purchases and rentals at the Cineplex Store.
It’s not an all-you-can-watch deal like MoviePass, the American cinema subscription scheme that crashed and burned in 2019; CineClub is capped at a maximum of three transactions per day.
But one could conceivably save $300 by seeing 90 movies in an average month, assuming one could find 90 different movies to see. As someone who has indeed seen that many movies in the space of 30 days – thanks, TIFF! – I do not recommend doing this. Your health will suffer, you’ll experience vertigo on the Scotiabank escalator at least twice, and once you pass 50 screenings you’ll realize you never loved cinema in the first place and this life is a curse. (On the upside, you’ll pay 20 per cent less for your snacks than I did.)
But if you keep it to one or two movies a week, that’s a decent savings.
A general-admission ticket is $13.25 before taxes, so a CineClub membership would pay for itself with three additional ticket purchases. This of course presumes there will be four movies worth seeing every month, but that’s why you rely on NOW’s reviews, right?
