Self-described meme stock ape Adam Aron is tossing a stinky, steaming pile of feces onto those folks who say the streaming content movement will end the movie theater business.
“There are so much conventional wisdom floating around that movie theaters cannot co-exist and cannot thrive in a world of streaming. What a load of like cow dung. There, that cleans that up nicely. What a load of cow dung,” the outspoken CEO of AMC told analysts on an earnings call Tuesday night.
Aron finally has better financials to back up his quarterly boasts as an easing COVID-19 pandemic sent people back into theaters.
AMC’s said fourth quarter sales were its strongest on a quarterly basis in two full years. Total sales rose to $1.12 billion from a pandemic-inflicted $162.5 million a year ago.
Attendance levels clocked in at 59.7 million compared to about 8 million a year earlier. The number of movie theater attendees improved sharply in both the U.S. and overseas.
Improved attendance sent adjusted operating profits to $159.2 million, much improved from a year ago loss of $327.5 million.
AMC shares fell 2% on Wednesday despite the stronger tone around business trends.
The company is so confident in its momentum it is employing dynamic pricing for the latest Batman movie debuting this coming weekend.
“Currently our prices for the Batman which opens this week are slightly higher than the prices we’re charging for other movies playing in the same theaters at the same time,” Aron explained.
The Twitter using CEO had a few parting thoughts for the haters of his brand, per the usual.
Said Aron, “The problem with conventional wisdom is that conventional wisdom is so often just utterly wrong. Remember the brokers reporting that AMC would file for bankruptcy in 2021. Well, remember that otherwise highly respected experts were calling for the AMC share price to fall to $2, $1 or even a penny by February or March of 2022. Now for all the world listening in, I[‘m] making no prognosis for the future. I’m looking only retrospectively, but those experts greatly underestimated AMC. With the full benefit of hindsight, we can now happily say because now it’s a simple matter of fact. They were wrong, they were wrong, they were wrong.”
Spoken like a true leader of the meme stock apes.
Brian Sozzi is an editor-at-large and anchor at Yahoo Finance. Follow Sozzi on Twitter @BrianSozzi and on LinkedIn.
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