⚔️ Sing In Me, O Muse, Of AMC

AMC Entertainment stock closed 26.29% higher on Monday after the company reported its highest-grossing quarter in its 106-year history, handily beating Wall Street estimates. 

Here’s the sometimes meme stock’s Q2 by the numbers: 

• Revenue of $1.59 billion (compared to analyst estimates of $1.47 billion.) 

• Adjusted EPS of $0.14 (estimate of -$0.03.) 

Those strong operational results were driven by, pretty simply, more people going to the movies: AMC said attendance was up nearly 14% in the quarter and EBITDA surged to $321.4 million, up nearly 70% year-to-date. 

On the earnings call on Monday, AMC Theatres CEO Adam Aron said “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” “Dune: Part Three,” and the upcoming Avengers movie can continue the positive momentum. “We believe that movie theaters will enjoy the full 12 months of 2026, their strongest yet post-pandemic year at both the domestic box office and at the global box office.”

It can’t but help AMC that its earnings results come the Monday after Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” had the biggest domestic opening weekend of the year for a live action film, crashing the AMC app and leaving fans struggling for tickets, especially for IMAX showings. It earned  $124.5 million in North America and an estimated $264.1 million globally. 

Across the industry, domestic movie ticket sales are up about 10 percent year-on-year, according to Variety. 

The Takeaway

It seems that the trend pieces about how people are going back to the movies again are grounded in reality. 

And to see “The Odyssey,” people aren’t just going to movie theaters – they’re going in massive numbers to a very small number of IMAX theaters. Nolan’s movie was filmed on IMAX and on Monday’s earnings call AMC CEO Adam Aron noted that while these larger-format screens represent only about 8% of AMC’s total, IMAX showings of the Odyssey, this weekend, generated more than 50% of our total ticket growth for the film. Aron said AMC is looking to increase the number of extra large screens in 100 to 250 auditoriums over the next several years using third party capital.

That is all very good news for the movie industry generally and AMC specifically. The company’s shares are up nearly 50% over the past six months on the back of the relatively good news about their underlying business of selling tickets and snacks to people who want to watch movies. 

But zoom out and things look less rosy: the stock is down 30% over the last 12 months and has dropped more than 98% from its 2021 meme stock peak. Much-better-than-solid operational results, it turns out, can be good for a stock, but nothing will compare to frenzied forum buying. 

– Paige Oamek and Ben Walsh

• 🎬 Avengers: Doomsday: Usually when you release a trailer, you generally want people to leave that three to five minute teaser considerably more excited about the quality of the film you intend to distribute. Yesterday’s release of the “Avengers: Doomsday” trailer did not exactly sell traders on the film’s prospects; the probability the movie finishes with a Rotten Tomatoes score above 85 dropped from 49% pre-trailer to 42% right after.*

• 📺 Paramount: Markets were relatively unfazed yesterday after a judge ordered Paramount to pause its acquisition of Warner Bros. while the court hears a round of anti-trust arguments from a group of states. The probability that Paramount seals the deal was flat at 82%, indicating that a judge at least hearing out the suit was largely priced in.

*Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.

A leather jacket worn by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sold for $960,000. Sotheby’s said the 65 bids they received for the jacket helped push the sale price well over the pre-sale estimate of between $40,000 and $60,000.

• D.R. Horton, Halliburton, Northrop Grumman, Hasbro, 3M, Schwab, and GM slated to release quarterly results ahead of the open.

• Interactive Brokers and Capital One slated to release quarterly results after the close.