Why is AMC stock price shooting up? Find out why #SaveAMC is trending
Ahh, the sight of the neon marquee, smell of fresh popcorn with realistic imitation-butter topping, sound of your shoes sticking to the floor as you walk down the aisle to your seat – is there anything better than going to the movies? Streaming content from a laptop on your chest has its own advantages, but there’s nothing like going to see a film on the big screen.
This sentiment is shared by Americans across the country, and many have been suffering during the pandemic, perhaps the darkest time for movie theaters since their first openings over a century ago. Many would argue the industry was already dying with the prominence of streaming platforms kicking the theater experience to the curb over the past decade.
On top of streaming’s reign over the way we watch movies, movie theaters faced even greater challenges this past year amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Theaters across the country closed when lockdown first began in the U.S. this past March, and many remain closed as the cases of COVID-19 continue to rise in many areas of the country. One of the companies hit hardest was AMC.
Save AMC
AMC theaters were in danger of bankruptcy over the past year as, even in areas where the theaters were open, ticket sales plummeted amid limited seating and the general public’s concern for health as there seemed to be no end yet in sight for the COVID-19 pandemic.
Movie lovers took to Twitter to not only express their love & memories of AMC theaters, but also to discuss a plan to help #SaveAMC. The tweets that started flooding Twitter with the #SaveAMC hashtag was meant to help promote buying AMC stock to get its stock price up in order to save the company.
People tweeted pictures of the empty theaters, stories about great times at the movies, and movie-inspired artwork in an attempt to spread awareness and get the AMC stock price raised as high as possible. The work of cinephiles across the country appears to have paid off, and Monday, AMC released some important news.
Cha-ching
Deseret News reported today that this past Monday AMC told its fans that the company was no longer in danger of filing for bankruptcy. The company owes this relief to a whopping $917 million influx of new financing we can only assume was a result of the campaign carried out by film fans on Twitter.
On Monday, the AMC stock price rose over thirty-six percent, making AMC happy, as well as new investors that took to Twitter to celebrate their victory. Other users expressed their pain having bought & sold AMC stock before the AMC stock price soared to a profitable margin this past week.
The new influx of cash compacts the $506 million raised in equity during the pandemic, but this doesn’t mean the company is out of the woods yet. Experts say the recent uptick of cash flow will help AMC, but theater-going is still down, and the effect of the constantly changing COVID-19 pandemic remains to be seen, still leaving plenty of room for failure.
In addition to the rise in AMC stock price, AMC has a new plan for moviegoers. Any film fan who used MoviePass no doubt dreams of the days of cheap unlimited movies before our precious red cards were snatched away from us. Lucky for us, AMC plans to release a similar program for twenty bucks a month, double what MoviePass charged, which still amounts to a bargain for theatergoers.
The future of the American movie theater is unknown, but if the AMC stock price is any indication, we may be able to hold on to our precious movie houses a bit longer. If we could have half as many new movies as there are TV series, the 2020s could stand a chance as a decade to remember in film history.
