Adam Aron
Analyst · StoneX
Thank you, Sean. I want to touch on 5 key topics before turning to your questions. First, as proud as we are of our Q3 results, I should also point out that we are also quite excited by our prospects for Q4 of this year. For the month of October, the domestic industry box office was up approximately 35% and the majority of the quarter's box office is still ahead of us. There are a flood of highly anticipated movies being released in November and December. Some of my personal favorites are I Play Rocky, Wild Horse Nine, The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, Inc., and Mr. Irrelevant. And then there is the blockbuster holiday slate, including Warner Bros. Dune: Part Three, Disney and Marvel's Avengers: Doomsday, Lionsgate's, The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping and Sony's Jumanji: Open World, among others. These titles will cap what is sure to be the best domestic box office in 7 years, one that we would expect will easily cross $10 billion and potentially wind up mostly much more than that. Second, it was fortuitous that as a key aspect of our AMC Go plan in which AMC got off our heels and started playing on offense again, that AMC aggressively embraced the offering of premium experiences in our theaters. In the U.S., our premium large-format screens and extra large-format screens represent 8% of our total U.S. screen count. In the third quarter of '26, those 8% of our U.S. screens generated fully 31% of our U.S. admissions revenues. And those PLF and XLF revenues grew by an astounding 62% year-over-year versus the third quarter of 2025. We did well across the board, but our hats off especially go to our friends and partners at IMAX who have been enjoying such enormous success this year. With AMC having about half of all the IMAX screens in the U.S. and for that matter, more than 90% of the Dolby Cinema screens in the U.S., not to mention our Prime and XL screens in addition, no one else in our industry comes close to the count of premium screens that are offered by AMC. Add to that, AMC is further embrace of laser projection. In the U.S., AMC now has 3,976 laser projection equipped auditoriums, 58% of our total U.S. screen count. And talking about premium offerings, everything worked well in Q3 of 2026. Our U.S. 3D admissions, which carry a price premium, their revenue grew by 43% versus Q3 of last year. Globally, it is the exact same story. In the U.S. and Europe combined, AMC and Odeon now have 226 IMAX screens, 187 Dolby cinema screens, 146 house-branded PLF screens, primarily Prime at AMC in the U.S. and iSense in our Odeon cinemas in Europe. We have deployed 19 CJ ScreenX and 4DX auditoriums and 217 XL screens. AMC and Odeon now offer nearly 800 PLF and XLF screens that is more than quadruple the number of premium screens offered by AMC Entertainment when I joined this company 10 years ago, and none of our competitors are anywhere close to us. Third, let me turn to an industry development of real consequence to the movie business. Earlier in October, Skydance, the owner of Paramount, completed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. The combined company brings together 2 storied studios whose movies have entertained generations and generations and generations of audiences. As you know, AMC has been a vocal champion for this transaction. Earlier this year, back in April, we were one of the very first entities to make our support of Skydance clear. We did so because we valued the sincere commitments being made by David Ellison and his Paramount team, more movies coming to theaters and longer exclusive theatrical windows, which translate to more time for those movies to appear exclusively in movie theaters on the big screen. We are confident that Skydance will do everything in its power to create and deliver appealing movies under both the Warner and Paramount brands going forward. Third, it is not just Skydance's Warner and Paramount who are committed to releasing quality movies in movie theaters. Disney and Universal continue to shine. Sony is still euphoric about its staggering success with Spider-Man: No Way Home, as is Lionsgate happy with Michael and its coming film in the Hunger Game franchise opening this month. Amazon has a full slate of movies now. They started the year big with Project Hail Mary, and I predict they have another winner on their hands with the soon-to-open I Play Rocky. I loved it, and I encourage every single one of you to see it. And we have been so impressed too by the films of smaller players, including A24, Angel, Black Bear, Neon, Bleecker Street, Falling Forward, GKIDS and Fathom, among others. I am encouraged as well by AMC's growing partnership with Netflix. In the fourth quarter of 2026, AMC will play 4 different Netflix movies in our theaters, La Bola Negra, The Mosquito Bowl, Inc. and The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth. In 2027, we have 2 Netflix movies already on the calendar. And importantly, they both carry a full theatrical window in Narnia and Charlie vs. the Chocolate Factory. We are actively working harmoniously with Netflix to do more together with them in 2027 and beyond. Fourth, on this webcast, I have declared that AMC has finally emerged from the storm cloud created by COVID. So it makes sense to take a moment just to step back and reflect on the extraordinary journey that AMC has traveled since then. I take you back to March of 2020 when the world as we knew it changed. Our theaters were all shuttered. In a week, our revenues totally evaporated and disappeared, and AMC suddenly faced a crisis unlike anything that any of us would ever have envisioned. The record of what happened thereafter is remarkable. We figured out how to slash costs and came up with new ways to drive revenue growth. Since March of 2020, the capital markets history of AMC reflects more than 130 separately gated actions, including nearly 100 debt transactions and more than 2 dozen equity transactions. We raised capital. We refinanced debt. We exchanged debt, we repurchased debt. We extended maturities. We sold assets. We created new securities. And at various points along the way, we repeatedly found innovative and sometimes unconventional solutions to problems that others said were unsolvable. Some of those decisions were difficult, some were complicated, some were unpopular. When liquidity was paramount, we raised capital. When maturities needed to be addressed, we addressed them. When opportunities existed to reduce or restructure debt, we pursued them. And when entirely new solutions were required, we created them. AMC did not have an option to take an easy road. Over and over again, we took the difficult road, both because we always believed it was the right road and also sometimes because it was the only path forward that looked to us to be workable. Take it all together, in short, at AMC Entertainment, we successfully threaded the needle. And finally, fifth, I'd like to conclude by saying this, that my confidence in AMC is resolute. For no company, is it always a sheer straight line upwards. But looking ahead, I could not be more bullish about the long-term prospects for our company. Moviegoing begets more moviegoing. Attendance at our theaters increased by 19% for the first 9 months of 2026, January to September year-over-year. And in Q3, it increased by 28% compared to the third quarter a year ago. The sources who I trust in Hollywood also are confident about the movie industry's rebound. Analysts are forecasting 2027 to be another box office year around $10 billion or so domestically. And many of those in the know in the movie industry are especially optimistic about the 2028 movie slate. One that we believe has every possibility of eclipsing that of 2026. Accordingly, given my confidence, I own and have a financial interest in a meaningful, in a truly sizable number of AMC shares, and I have not sold a single AMC share since January of 2022. To the contrary, many of you will recall that earlier this year, back in the spring, I bought additional shares of AMC stock. As I said, my confidence in AMC is resolute. With that, Sean, let's turn to questions from security analysts and from our shareholders.