NEW YORK -- Booming box office through the holidays helped AMC Entertainment Inc. turn a profit of $233,000 in the third quarter, compared with a $1 million loss a year earlier, on 32% higher sales of $216 million.
Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization rocketed 55% to $29.4 million, and AMC said its admissions per screen rose about 10% in the quarter. AMC stock rose 12¢ to $27.62 Wednesday.
But the performance, in marked contrast to the profit slump that No. 1 exhib Carmike Cinema says it will report next week, was largely due to an extension of the quarter compared with a year earlier. AMC VP for finance Craig Ramsey said AMC's third quarter ended Jan. 1, whereas a year earlier the quarter ended Dec. 26.
Not surprisingly, given the strength of the box office recorded for that week, the extra days made a huge difference to AMC's financial performance. Ramsey said that attendance per screen would have been positive if the quarter had ended on the same day, but the growth would have been less than 1%.
He said he had not calculated the impact on AMC's bottom line of excluding the extra week.
Ramsey attributed the growth in attendance per screen to both the popular holiday releases as well as the drawing power of AMC's megaplexes.
"We are growing the number of megaplexes in our circuit and their economics are better than our multiplex group so our numbers have been improving," Ramsey said. AMC opened 11 new theaters with a total of 264 screens in the quarter, increasing the proportion of megaplex screens to about one-third of the total of 2,225.
AMC has come under heavy criticism from other exhibs for expanding through megaplexes, which have as many as 30 screens, compared with the plexes opened by most other exhibs that have no more than 18 screens.
Furman Selz analyst Stewart Halpern said the result "underscores that their megaplex strategy is working."
"It shows that when you build these big boxes it does not just cannibalize the marketplace but attracts more people to go to the movies," Halpern added.
AMC plans to open about 192 megaplex screens in the current quarter, which ends April 2, the company said.
Contact the Variety newsroom at
news@variety.com