Technology

More bad news for subscription movie ticket service MoviePass, which acknowledged yesterday that there was an unidentified issue preventing people from using their MoviePass credit cards to get tickets.

A regulatory filing from parent company Helios - Matheson offers more insight about what happened. The filing (first spotted by Business Insider) announces a &demand note& of $6.2 million, including $5 million in cash that the company borrowed. It goes on to explain:

The $5.0 million cash proceeds received from the Demand Note will be used by the Company to pay the Companymerchant and fulfillment processors. If the Company is unable to make required payments to its merchant and fulfillment processors, the merchant and fulfillment processors may cease processing payments for MoviePass, Inc. (&MoviePass&), which would cause a MoviePass service interruption. Such a service interruption occurred on July 26, 2018.

In other words, it looks like MoviePass wasn&t able to pay one of its service providers, which led to the outage. In order to make those payments, it borrowed $5 million.

This doesn&t exactly inspire confidence in MoviePass& finances. A Helios - Matheson filing from earlier this month suggested that the company was looking to raise up to $1.2 billion in equity and debt financing to fund MoviePass& operations and growth.

Meanwhile, although the service is best-known for offering access to unlimited movie tickets for $9.95 per month, the specifics of the pricing model have been changingpretty frequently.

With Comcast officially out of the way, Disneybuyout of 21st Century Fox assets just took another major step toward reality. Shareholders from both mega media companies have approved the $71.3 billion deal.

In a lovely bit of classic media performance art, shareholders from both boards took separate meetings at the New York Hilton this morning to vote on the deal.

In an interview with Variety, Fox general counsel called the deal a &transformative transaction that will enable us to unlock significant value for our stockholders.&It also means yet another major bit of major media consolidation among a withering major movie studio system, but at least the X-Men will get to fight the Avengers, I guess.

Some fun bits from these meetings, per Variety again: one shareholder at Disney said the company was overpaying for Fox, while another at Fox apparently walked up to the mic to say, &Nobody does it like Rupert Murdoch. I love Rupert Murdoch.&

I don&t know. We love who we love, I guess.

The deal has been brewing for more than half a year. Back in December, Disney offered up $52.4 billion for assets, including the 20th Century Fox movie studio, the FX network and more. Comcast helped hike up the price with a $65 billion offer back in June, but ultimately pulled out of the race a week or so back.

According to the companies, the deal is expected to close in early 2019, pending all of the standard regulatory approval.