Can a Brash Executive in Kansas Save Movie Theaters?

Most of the time, the 116-year-old movie theater business is rather humdrum.

Tickets get sold. Images get projected onto screens, sometimes in 3-D. Every now and then, change-phobic cinema operators get excited about an innovation. The armrest cup holder, for instance, was patented in 1981.

But these are not normal times at movie houses. Just ask Adam Aron.

A year ago, Mr. Aron, who runs AMC Entertainment, the world’s largest multiplex chain, was feeling unusually invigorated about his antiquated industry. Even with streaming services proliferating — and attendance in North America declining — cinemas worldwide collected $42.5 billion in 2019, a record high. “We see dramatic growth in the size of the domestic box office not so far away,” he said with flourish in late February.

By mid-March, the coronavirus had forced Mr. Aron to furlough 35,000 workers, including himself, and close every AMC theater: 10,700 screens in 15 countries. As the coronavirus surged and retreated and resurged, AMC reopened most of its theaters, re-closed many of them and, lately, started to reopen some of them again. To keep the debt-saddled chain alive, Mr. Aron and his chief financial officer, Sean Goodman, who joined AMC just a couple of months before the crisis, have done financial back flips, narrowly averting bankruptcy four times in nine months. AMC has raised more than $1 billion in fits and starts and has secured another $1 billion or so in rent deferrals from landlords.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/22/business/media/adam-aron-movie-theaters-amc.html