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. Users of the app can compete in tournaments, head-to-head matchups, or play solo. MoviePass is likening it to a fantasy sports league.

“You basically create your own studio by picking real movies, real actors, real directors and the way those projects behave in the real world, and your ability to pick and predict what might happen, impacts your scoring,” explained Stacy Spikes, co-founder and CEO of MoviePass.

It is free to join and play. Over time and with regulatory approval, the hope is that Mogul players can compete for money. The company currently has a waiting list of 400,000 people and expects to have 200,000 users by the end of May.

“We’re 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. MoviePass has the option to pay back the money it uses or to convert some of that for equity. The company said that the funds will “help enhance platform features, including data-driven competitions, digital collectibles, rewards-based gameplay and community-led challenges.”

MoviePass was a pioneer in the movie-theater subscription service space, which companies like AMC and Regal have come to embrace. But it has had a turbulent history. MoviePass became a phenomenon after it introduced a $9.95 monthly membership plan in 2017 that promised consumers they could get tickets to a movie a day. 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. MoviePass filed for Chapter 11 in 2020. It was reacquired by Spikes roughly a year later.

Spikes wasn’t around for the roughest part of MoviePass’s 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.

“We’ve always been a company built from a fan perspective,” he said. “We’re not a studio, we’re not a theater, but we want to really find a new way of creating engagement around going to the movies. We don’t want people to just sit at home. This allows film fans to show the same competitive spirit that sports teams inspire.”

MoviePass developed Mogul with its partner, C3 Foundation.