Will meme stocks, Nicole Kidman and a literal gold mine save the movie theater industry? The CEO of AMC thinks so.
In April, actor Dwayne Johnson, dressed in a tight red V-neck, walked to the Colosseum stage at Las Vegas’ Caesars Palace to gleeful applause from thousands of movie theater operators.“The silverback himself is in the house,” said Johnson, there to promote his upcoming DC superhero movie “Black Adam.” “What’s up, Adam? Why do they call you the silverback?”“All right, well, don’t mess with Adam,” Johnson said.
“I think it’s important to read these things, because it gives me a very good finger on the pulse and a sense of what is on the minds of the people who own AMC,” Aron said. “And remember, they do own our company, and what they think matters.”To some, he’s a savvy operator who came into the theater business as an outsider but saved AMC from almost certain bankruptcy during the pandemic. To critics, though, his penchant for P.T. Barnum-esque showmanship is wearing thin.
Aron’s marketing skill and eye for the limelight, developed over decades in hotels, airlines and sports, turned out to be well-suited for courting the meme-stock crowd.Are movie theaters back for real this time? The resulting commercial, which ran on TV and before every AMC screening, achieved cult fandom. Fans recited Kidman’s dramatic lines and put them on T-shirts When theaters started replacing the 60-second ad with a shorter version, fans circulated a petition to protest.“Adam has done an amazing job of steering the company through the pandemic,” said Peter Levinsohn, vice chairman and chief distribution officer of Comcast Corp.'s Universal Filmed Entertainment Group.
“Instead of paying down debt, he’s investing in a mining company,” Greenfield said, who has had a price target of 1 cent on AMC’s stock since March 2021, when the stock was priced at $10.50. The stock now trades at about $12 a share. “He’s taking investor resources and trying to promote a popcorn business and wasting energy on a crypto coin scheme at his theaters.”
To him, expanding into things like the gold mine deal and popcorn sales is an example of going “on offense.” Same goes for a recent deal to outfit thousands of auditoriums with laser projectors. Minting NFTs for movies like “The Batman” and “Spider-Man: No Way Home” helped sell movie tickets.And though he frequently uses the latest box office hit to refute the “naysayers” and “prophets of doom,” as he calls doubters, he acknowledges the business is not out of the woods yet.
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