The Hollywood box office rebound, thanks to tentpoles like Wicked, Gladiator II and Moana 2, has been good to long-suffering AMC Entertainment Holdings and its sluggish stock price.
On Tuesday, the parent of AMC Theatres posted a net loss for the fourth quarter at $135.6 million, an improvement from the year-ago net loss of $182 million, which included a non-cash impairment charge related to long-lived assets of $106.9 million.
The cinema chain also reported overall revenues of 1.3 billion, up 18.3 percent from a year-earlier $1.1 billion. That matched an analyst estimate of fourth quarter revenues at $1.3 billion, according to a Benzinga Pro consensus.
The year-ago box office came mostly from Taylor Swift and Beyonce concert films with special event pricing as the world’s biggest exhibitor had to make do with a thin Hollywood tentpole slate. This year, the major studios refocusing on theatrical releases coming out of the pandemic has produced an ongoing box office rebound for North American industry cinema ticket sales.
Fourth quarter admissions revenue at AMC came to $721.4 million, a rise from the year-earlier $614.6 million. And food and beverage revenues were $446.2 million, compared to a year-earlier $370.2 million, as AMC saw its average food and beverage sales per patron come in at $7.15, a fourth quarter record just up from $7.13 in the same period of 2023 when sales centered on concert films.
The cinema giant reported a global attendance at 62.4 million film-goers, thanks to a box office rebound, up from 51.9 million patrons during the year-ago period. In the U.S. market, AMC hosted 42.95 million cinema-goers, up from a year-earlier 35.4 million. Internationally, where AMC has the Odeon chain in Europe and Middle East operations, 19.46 million patrons came into its theaters during the latest quarter, against a year-earlier 16.4 million cinema-goers.
During the fourth quarter, the diluted per-share loss at the cinema chain came to 35 cents, better than the year-earlier diluted loss of 83 cents. AMC also generated $203.6 million in cash from operations, and $113.9 million in free cash flow.
“Naturally, we are pleased by our impressive finish to the year. We also take comfort as a result of the decisive actions we took during 2024 to strengthen our balance sheet, lower our debt levels, bolster our cash reserves,” AMC Theatres CEO Adam Aron said in a statement after the release of his fourth quarter financial results.
But with the mega exhibitor far from taming its overall debt load, shares in AMC Entertainment Holdings continue to lag industry peers. Stock in AMC Entertainment on Tuesday closed down 9 cents, or 2.7 percent, at $3.27. After market, shares in AMC Entertainment jumped 5 percent, or 20 cents, to $3.47.
During an after-market conference call, Aron attempted to win over retail investors stung by a falling share price in recent years. “Do not allow yourself to be distracted. Our biggest problem is not various market practices that some of you seem to detest. Instead, quite simply, it’s that the movie industry and the the movie theater industry has been in crisis for more than four long years,” he argued on the call.
Aron complained there was “so much false information floating around AMC on social media. Similarly, there are crackpot conspiracy theorists like one after another that seem to delight in speaking foolishly about AMC.”
Retail investors have complained that stock sales in the past that were used to strengthen the company’s balance sheet diluted the value of stockholdings. Aron reiterated that stock sales were done to ensure the survival of the company due to the impact of the pandemic.
“So many movie theater chains have been forced into bankruptcy in the last four years because they ran out of cash. Not AMC. I repeat, not AMC. We stayed strong. We stayed alive, we stayed healthy, we stayed on the path towards recovery because of the actions that we took,” Aron argued.
In early 2021, AMC became a popular stock among retail investors, after the company appeared close to bankruptcy amid the pandemic fallout at movie theater chains. The stock surge helped the company strengthen its financial position, as executives seized upon their meme status to sell shares and repurchase debt. But that stock momentum has long since faded.
During the conference call where Aron took no questions from Wall Street analysts, he also addressed a deal for Netflix to run its upcoming movie Narnia exclusively in Imax theaters for two weeks worldwide in late 2026, before director Greta Gerwig’s tentpole launches on the streaming giant.
“Right now, Narnia is scheduled to play on AMC Imax screens,” Aron said, in response to media reports that some big theater chains have threatened not to show Narnia on their Imax screens in 2026. But the AMC Theatres chief didn’t disguise his frustration with Netflix not supporting theatrical releases like other tech players making movies for longer stretches at the local multiplex, as well as their own platforms.
“We would love to be able to convince Netflix that embracing theatrical releases is good for them. They did it with Glass Onion. They are doing it with Narnia. We’ll see where this goes. Narnia is still two years away. But having said all that, I have always believed that the appetite for entertainment is so voracious that it can support both the robust theatrical industry and a robust streaming industry side by side,” Aron said.
Aron also returned to his longstanding opposition to the traditional theatrical window, once as long as 90 days before the pandemic, having collapsed in the streaming era with the introduction of often hybrid releases. “I sure hope that we can introduce longer windows, because I think that the current industry experiment on windows has failed,” he argued.
“We believe that theater chains would generate more money if windows were longer. But we also believe that studios would generate more money if windows were longer,” he added. Aron argued the exclusive, shorter theatrical window in part has led to overall Hollywood box office not getting back to pre-pandemic levels, despite the film industry enjoying a growth trajectory.
“Watch this space. We’ll continue to see what we can do to convince the industry that is firm around this 45-day number that maybe we can extend it to 60 days or 74 days, like it was pre-pandemic. We will all learn together, but this is a very live debate topic right now,” Aron said.