AMC Theaters Are Edging Closer to Financial Ruin
By George Robbins
Movie theaters are definitely among the businesses who are the worst off right now because they are making so little income that they cannot afford to continue on the way they always have. What many people forget is the fact that theaters only end up getting a portion of their money from ticket sales and the rest from concessions. As always, they only get a percentage of the money from ticket sales back as their own revenue while the rest goes back to the studios and now, this has become something of a perilous venture. Nobody is really willing to go out to theaters anymore and it is creating a lot of issues for the movie theater industry as a whole since they kind of rely on that sort of thing. AMC has been one of the biggest movie theater chains at the front and center of all of this and they are suffering for it.
AMC, like all other movie theater chains, was set on reopening their doors to the public as soon as possible, but when they were finally given the greenlight, issues started cropping up everywhere. One of the biggest issues was a surge in virus cases which resulted in movie delays, so they decided to push back their opening until eventually they decided they didn’t want to wait anymore. This prompted movie releases to start happening and we finally got new movies in theaters for the first time in months with not so great turn out. It turns out there was a reason why theaters should have stayed closed as it could have ended up saving them money they are going to need. No one in the general public is really willing to put themselves at risk going out to the movies at a time like this and so movies that were released are now failures.
AMC in particular has been very out there in terms of letting people know how much trouble they are in and have just recently announced that they will have no money left soon. They have said that by the end of this year, or some time in early 2021, they will no longer have any money left as they are losing too much right now. In an effort to save money, Regal Cinemas shut down not too long ago to avoid this very scenario and while AMC doesn’t quite seem like they will be following in those footsteps just yet, they won’t really have a choice soon. The truth is that they have no movies to show people and even if they did, they may not be able to bring people in at all because people are far too wary of places like that right now. Theaters are in trouble and AMC specifically may end up losing everything if they don’t play their cards right moving forward.