$AMC CEO Aron puts his money where his mouth is in this CNBC breaking interview

AMC wants to break film’s fourth wall with bet on virtual reality 53 Mins AgoAdam Aron, AMC Entertainment president & CEO, and Kevin Wall, Dreamscape Immersive co-chairman, discusses AMC teaming up with Dreamscape to bring virtual reality to the movie theater experience.

I’m dubious about VR in a movie theatre when its hard enough to pull off an engaging immersive experience with a dedicated headset and high end graphic chips in a computer but what appeals to me here is two fold:

CEO all but leaks that business is great in September and things the holiday season will be big. Stock is at lifetime low, pays 5% dividend and the CEO is buying.

Consensus is that movie attendance is in secular decline due to the proliferation of over the top and small screen options,;i.e. Netflix, Amazon, Apple TV, etc. This may be true but it also may be that we are experiencing a temporary draught of quality films.  What is appealing to me though is that I’ve heard rumblings about Netflix buying a movie chain and putting in all you can binge options.  Even more what’s real is that AMC and Movie Pass rolled out MoviePass’s $35 to $45 packages at AMC theaters in Boston and Denver on a kind of test basis — one that not coincidentally yielded an 18-month blind study, tracking moviegoers behavior. The findings? Viewers went to the movies 100 percent more thanks to MoviePass. And perhaps even more meaningfully for the bottom line, popcorn sales shot up by a whopping 123 percent.

Move Pass has dropped to just under $10 (the average price for a single movie ticket in most of the country is just under $9) and the subscription base exploded from around 20,000 subscribers to more than 300,000 paying customers in almost no time. AMC threatens to sue but is sure to roll out its own offering with or without Movie Pass.  The all you an eat move binge is on its way to a theatre near you.

Source: AMC wants to break film’s fourth wall with bet on virtual reality