Good piece from The Hollywood Reporter how online directed group buying is propping up AMC’s stock price, keeping it an attractive investment and a company worth loaning money so that it will survive the pandemic.
It’s kind of a GameStop scenario, where fans of the game store brought them back from the dead by buying and boosting their stock price, and clobbered a lot of Wall Street types who gambled that they’d go under.
Who is shorting AMC? They have looked doomed for the past year, do it wouldn’t be the dumbest bet. SOMEbody has to be losing, with a few million Reddit “Wall Street Bets” investors buying up the stock.
Adam Arons, the CEO, is on board with this fan takeover. The users of the company’s theaters own it? Win win, I say. As there’s a Diane Fossey “Gorillas in the Mist” charity that also benefits from this investor activism, it’s got a righteous side, totally beyond the “save the theaters” and “Screw the short sellers.”
Still not my favorite film chain, but they keep a lot of smaller older theaters going and thus help prop up the movie going habit.
They were the first major theater chain to pull its newspaper advertising, further crippling newspapers and killing the movie reviewing profession (and eroding the movie going habit in the public’s mind further as well). When I called them on it, they sent a form letter snidely suggesting that newspapers continue publishing their showtimes, for free, “as a public service.”
So I won’t shed any tears if they go down. But here’s the link to the THR report.
Movie Nation 