With yesterday’s confirmation from Cineworld, the parent company of Regal Cinemas, that the company would be closing all of its US and UK movie theaters “until further notice,” film fans (and box office analysts) feared the worst. When would AMC follow suit? And would this be the final nail in the coffin of theater exhibition in 2020 (and possibly forever)? Well, AMC isn’t ready to close its doors. At least not yet.
According to Deadline, AMC has confirmed the theater chain has no plans on closing, despite its biggest competition bowing out of the fall 2020 box office. In fact, AMC credits the highly controversial deal with Universal as the reason that the theater chain can remain open while its competition struggles.
“We take great comfort in knowing that literally millions of moviegoers have already visited our theatres,” said AMC CEO Adam Aron. “They have done so in part because of our AMC Safe & Clean protocols, developed in consultation with Clorox and faculty of the Harvard University School of Public Health. Our guests are telling us that our theatres have never been cleaner, and that they recognize the great effort AMC is making to keep them healthy and safe.”
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He continued, “Fortunately for AMC, our groundbreaking agreement with Universal Studios announced earlier this summer puts AMC in a position where we can open our theatres when others may feel the need to close. We are fully comfortable showing Universal films in our theaters, even as they implement premium video on demand as we have mutually agreed. This is because AMC will share in premium revenues coming from their early availability in the home.”
As Aron explained, the deal with Universal allows AMC to show films exclusively in theaters for 17 days (aka three weekends) before the studio releases them on PVOD. And then when those features arrive on Premium Video-on-Demand, AMC would share part of the revenue with the studio. When AMC and Universal announced this deal earlier this year, other theater chains and studios scoffed at the idea of collapsing the window and allowing films to go early to PVOD. However, AMC is now countering that argument by keeping its doors open while Cineworld and other cinemas around the US begin to worry about how they’ll pay the bills.
As for how this affects film fans, this is actually fairly reassuring. Just recently, there was a published report that claimed AMC was not just struggling, but could actually be in dire circumstances if ticket sales didn’t improve over the next six months. And with studios pulling more and more films from 2020 and dating them for later in 2021, it was assumed that AMC would find itself in a terrible position. But, at least for now, it would appear that the world’s largest theater chain is confident that it can ride out this storm.