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Intermission film ltd9/11/2023 With the pandemic shutting down its business, AMC stock is worth around $500 million total. Movies have increasingly needed to launch on thousands of screens at once, leading to the dominance of Marvel movies.ĪMC Theaters itself is loaded up with $5 billion debt and owned by public shareholders, the Chinese conglomerate the Wanda Group and private equity firm Silver Lake Partners. The AMC theater experience was bad, with overpriced food, inflexible scheduling, and a bland corporatized feel. Since the 1990s, there has been a massive roll-up of the movie exhibition business into a few poorly managed and highly indebted movie chains, one of them being AMC. This is not to say the existing setup, even before the pandemic, was a healthy open market. Before the pandemic, independent theaters protested the attempt to rescind the decree, writing in a brief that “if the Paramount decrees continue to be respected, the entry of behemoths like Amazon into the exhibition business would more likely be on terms that deterred Amazon from abusing its market power either to favor its own cinemas with its content or to punish fairly competing exhibitors.” Online streaming introduces a new competitive channel, so who cares if studios can buy theaters? Rescinding the Paramount decrees opened the door to speculation Amazon, or perhaps Disney, would be buying a movie chain. The stated reason Delrahim is ending this decree is that he thinks technology makes it irrelevant. The decrees broke apart this system, and created an open market for film, leading to a creative explosion and more freedom for artists, most notably the “New Hollywood” of the 1960s. As I’ve written, prior to these decrees, Hollywood was structured in what was known as the Studio System, in which a small number of vertically integrated studio chiefs essentially decided what artists could make and what Americans could watch, through either direct ownership of theaters or the use of must-have blockbuster content to control theaters. The Paramount decrees basically impose a structural separation in the film exhibition business, making it hard for movie studios to buy or control theater chains or distribution. Last year, Trump Department of Justice Antitrust chief Makan Delrahim paved the way for such an acquisition by unilaterally rescinding an important consent decree that structures the film industry, a 1948 resolution to long-standing antitrust claims against movie studios called the Paramount decrees. Amazon Buying AMC Theaters? Last weekend, the Daily Mail reported on rumors that Amazon is in talks to buy AMC Theaters, the largest movie chain theater in the world, with over 8,000 screens in the United States alone.
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