On August 3, AMC announced the highest-revenue weekend in its 106-year history. More than 10.2 million people had gone to AMC and its Odeon subsidiary’s theaters, with Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey leading the box office. It was a sign that, financially at least, movie theaters are looking much healthier than they did a few years ago.
Still, the recovery is not as straightforward as the box office numbers suggest. This summer brought in $4.76 billion at the North American box office, narrowly surpassing the record set in 2013. But people are still going to the movies much less than they did before the COVID-19 pandemic; theaters sold an estimated 470.9 million tickets through the first 30 weeks of this year, down from 747.3 million over the comparable period in 2019. The money has come back faster than the crowds: Tickets cost more now, especially for IMAX and other premium screenings.
Twenty-eight days after its record weekend, AMC announced that it needed more movies
The company is starting Leawood Films, a distributor focused on small and midsized features. “Leawood Films is being created with a straightforward objective, given that substantial excess capacity exists in the movie theatre industry: to bring more movies to theatres,” Adam Aron, AMC’s CEO, said in a press release. “Moviegoers consistently demonstrate their appetite for a wide variety of theatrical content, and we believe there are more outstanding films that deserve the opportunity to find audiences on the big screen.” The first Leawood releases are unly before 2027 or 2028.
The biggest movies are doing fine. But theaters need a steady flow of people coming through their doors. They have to schedule workers, order food and drinks, and keep the building running between blockbusters, and there is no guarantee that the next projected hit will actually land.
“This isn’t a business that can sustain itself off blockbusters alone,” Daniel Loria, senior vice president of content strategy at the Boxoffice Company, told me. “That’s a very high-risk proposition.”
Loria pointed to Joker: Folie à Deux in 2024 as an example of the risk of relying so heavily on blockbusters
Distributors had largely stayed away from its release date, assuming it would be a hit, leaving October thin when it bombed. “Forget a bad weekend,” Loria says. “You’re talking about a bad month. You might be talking about six weeks if something doesn’t connect.”
Studios can afford to make those bets; theaters have to fill their screens every week. Yet by one measure, the supply of movies has nearly recovered. Cinema United, the theater industry trade group, projects 115 movies will open in at least 2,000 North American locations this year, roughly in line with the 120 that did so in 2019. But those releases aren’t necessarily spread evenly through the year—this summer had 34 wide releases, compared with 44 in 2019—and much of the old middle of the theatrical business hasn’t returned. Loria mentioned adult dramas, romantic comedies, and R-rated comedies, movies somewhere between an indie breakout and superhero IP. “That seems to be a gap in the marketplace,” he says.
The decline in midbudget movies began well before COVID. The Fithian Group, an exhibition consulting firm, found that the number of movies grossing between $50 million and $100 million, one measure of the theatrical middle, fell 40% between 2004 and 2019. The home video market that had once helped studios recoup the cost of these movies was disappearing. Studios increasingly put their money into franchises with the potential for enormous worldwide grosses. Horror survived the shift better than most genres, in part because the movies were generally cheap to make.
COVID shut down production, and the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikesstopped it again
The decline in output from some of the major studios, though, had started earlier. Fox, for instance, had typically released 12 to 17 movies a year before Disney bought the company in 2019, plus the Fox Searchlight slate. Soon after the acquisition, Disney said it expected the core Fox studio to release only five or six a year.
AMC describes its dependence on the studios plainly in its annual filing: “We rely on distributors of motion pictures, over whom we have no control, for the films that we exhibit.” In 2025, seven distributors accounted for approximately 83% of AMC’s US admissions revenue.
For much of Hollywood’s early history, that separation didn’t exist. Paramount, Loew’s/MGM, Warner Bros., RKO, and Fox produced and distributed movies while also owning large theater circuits. The United States v. Paramount Pictures decision in 1948 and the consent decrees that ed forced the studios to give up their theaters.
“If I’m a distributor, I have many avenues for distribution,” says Ross Melnick, a professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who specializes in theatrical exhibition
“But if I’m a movie theater, I only have one thing I’m trying to do, which is run a movie theater.”
A studio can make fewer movies, spend more on the biggest ones, or send others to streaming. The theater is stuck with its screens and its lease either way. Plenty of the movies the major studios have stopped making are being made elsewhere, says Loria, the Boxoffice Company strategist. Getting them into multiplexes is another matter. Some never find a distributor; others get little marketing or come out at the wrong time.
“There’s a whole genre and segment of films which just aren’t being produced by the major studios anymore,” he tells Fast Company. “That doesn’t mean that they’re not being made.”
The multiplex gave exhibitors more flexibility
With two screens, a theater could move a poorly performing movie into a smaller auditorium instead of being stuck with it on its only screen. It could also show movies aimed at different audiences.
AMC pushed that logic much further in 1995, when it opened the Grand 24 in Dallas, its first megaplex: 24 screens and 5,067 seats. Soon chains were building giant complexes around the country, with stadium seating, bigger screens, and better sound. By 2000, analysts estimated that the industry had borrowed $7 billion for expansion in five years, while the number of screens grew from around 27,000 to 37,000. “There’s simply too many screens, much more supply than demand,” one industry analyst told the Washington Post that year. Several major chains had filed for bankruptcy protection or announced plans to do so.
The multiplex remained, even as the ways studios distributed movies began to change. During and after COVID, studios experimented with releasing movies straight to streaming or simultaneously at home and in theaters. Melnick, the film studies professor, thinks that period has largely passed.
“There was a sense that theatrical was maybe not going to come first anymore,” he says
“You could just go directly to streaming.” Studios have since rediscovered the value a theatrical run can create for a film in later distribution windows. “There’s a lot of attention that gets paid to a film when it comes out theatrically,” Melnick adds.
AMC also warns in its annual report that further consolidation could reduce the supply of films available for theatrical release. David Ellison has sought to reassure theater owners about Paramount’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery by promising that the combined company will release at least 30 movies theatrically each year.
The mechanics of getting independent movies into theaters have also changed. When exhibitors converted from 35 mm to digital projection, the studios helped finance the new equipment through virtual print fees. Loria says those agreements could restrict how many movies from outside the studio system participating theaters booked. They have now largely expired, while digital distribution has sharply reduced the cost of getting a movie onto thousands of screens; AMC predicted during the conversion that it would make “alternative content and niche programming” easier to deliver. A24 and Neon, once associated largely with specialty theaters, now routinely put movies into multiplexes.
This is not the first time AMC has gone looking for movies outside the major studios
In 2011, it joined Regal to create Open Road Films after major studio releases had declined. Regal told investors that the studios’ “big-budget franchise film strategy” had created a gap for smaller-budget movies that could bring more people into its theaters.
Open Road distributed The Grey, Chef, Nightcrawler, Dope, and Spotlight, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2016. The successes weren’t enough to make the business work. By 2017, filings from its two owners showed that Open Road had generated roughly $100 million in losses. AMC and Regal sold it to Tang Media Partners that year.
Leawood won’t finance movies the way Open Road did. AMC calls the new company a “disciplined low-risk opportunity” and says it will be “modestly scaled.” The films have to arrive finished or fully financed. Distributors often acquire movies after someone else has paid to make them. Neon, for instance, bought Together after the film premiered at Sundance, then handled its theatrical release. That is the part of the business Leawood wants: choosing movies, marketing them and getting them onto screens.
AMC has also distributed event films since Open Road, most successfully Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour, which grossed more than $261 million worldwide
Leawood won’t necessarily need its movies to be hits. On a quiet weekend, even one making $5 million or $10 million can help fill screens.
Alamo Drafthouse, owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, has begun experimenting with another version of the same idea. This summer it launched Alamo Exclusives, giving limited theatrical runs to festival films that haven’t secured distribution. Its first was a documentary about the Butthole Surfers that premiered at the South by Southwest festival. Alamo doesn’t acquire the films; it makes exhibition deals directly with filmmakers.
Theater owners have long worried about whether they have enough good movies to show. Part of the problem is simply keeping people in the habit of moviegoing.
“You go see a movie, you see the trailers, you have a great experience,” Melnick says
“You say, ‘Oh, I want to go see that next weekend.’ When people break the movie-going habit, they get out of the cycle.”
Leawood may amount to very little. Its first release is at least a year away, and Aron has said that if it puts only “a few extra movies” into theaters, that’s “gravy.” AMC isn’t expecting Leawood to transform its business, but after one of the best summers in its history, the country’s largest theater chain still needs movies badly enough to get further into the business of distributing them itself. A record summer, it turns out, can still leave a lot of screens to fill.
Sumber Artikel:
Fastcompany.com
