They've been a thing in the US for a long time as well. I remember them in the early 1990s when I was a teenager, so I assume they probably existed for decades before that. I don't know why MoviePass was perceived as a good idea, other than the notion of centralizing the service into one bigger company and away from individual theater chains (which could then give an entity like MoviePass leverage to suck more value out of the movie theaters as a whole; another middleman parasite that adds very little real value).