Good day, everyone, and welcome to the AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc. Second Quarter Earnings Webcast. [Operator Instructions] It is now my pleasure to turn the program over to John Merriwether, Vice President, Capital Markets.

Thank you, Leo. Good afternoon. I'd like to welcome everyone to AMC's Second Quarter 2025 Earnings Webcast. With me this afternoon is Adam Aron, our Chairman and CEO; and Sean Goodman, our Chief Financial Officer. Before I turn the webcast over to Adam, I'd like to remind everyone that some of the comments made by management during this webcast may contain forward-looking statements that are based on management's current expectations. Numerous risks uncertainties and other factors may cause actual results to differ materially from those that might be expressed today. Many of those risks and uncertainties are discussed in our most recent public filings, including our most recently filed 10-K and 10-Q. Several of the factors that will determine the company's future results are beyond the ability of the company to control or predict. In light of the uncertainties inherent in any forward-looking statements, listeners are cautioned against relying on these statements. The company undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information or future events. On this webcast, we may reference non-GAAP financial measures such as adjusted EBITDA, free cash flow and constant currency, among others. For a full reconciliation of our non-GAAP measures to GAAP results, please see our earnings release posted in the Investor Relations section of our website earlier this morning. After our prepared remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. This afternoon's webcast is being recorded, and a replay will be available in the Investor Relations section of our website at amctheaters.com later today. With that, I'll turn the call over to Adam.

Thank you, John. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. It's earnings at AMC and what a day it is, in this second quarter of 2025, AMC showcased the impressive operating leverage that is inherent in our business. Importantly, in Q2, movies from just about every single major and minor studio alike crushed it at the box office in spectacular fashion. With the second quarter domestic industry box office surpassing that of the first quarter of 2025 by a stunning 85%. At AMC, we are particularly pleased that on many of these second quarter movies, our market share way overperformed. That came in part because of our network of especially productive theaters, AMC and Odeon having more premium large-format screens than any other exhibitor on the planet and the effectiveness of our compelling marketing programs. In this year's second quarter, AMC and Odeon rolled out the red carpet for nearly 63 million guests worldwide, a 25.6% increase over the same period last year. Beyond merely attaining that attendance growth, AMC's revenue growth was actually 35.6% above last year's second quarter, adding in our very tight control of our costs, AMC drove an adjusted EBITDA increase of 391.4% to a highly gratifying $189.2 million. That's a good formula. Revenues way up, combined with quite a tight management of costs, and it generated $150.7 million more adjusted EBITDA in this year's second quarter than was posted in last year's second quarter. It is a simple reality and hopefully a harbinger of things to come that as AMC's revenues grow, our EBITDA can soar. With such a sizable increase in adjusted EBITDA from $38 million and change last year to $189 million and change this year, our net cash provided by AMC's operating activities in the quarter surged to a…

Thanks, Adam, and thank you, everyone, for joining us this afternoon. We are pleased to report a quarter in which, as Adam just noted, the team set a number of very impressive records about -- across both our domestic and international operations. Substantial year-over-year industry growth drove our attendance growth, which when coupled with record-breaking per patron revenue and per patron profit resulted in an outstanding set of results for the second quarter. Allow me to elaborate. I'm comparing consolidated results for Q2 2025 to Q2 of 2024. Global attendance rose 25.6% as we welcomed 63 million moviegoers to our theaters. Total revenue grew by 35.6% or 34.1% in constant currency, reaching $1.4 billion. Adjusted EBITDA grew fourfold to $189.2 million, and we generated free cash flow of $89 million, a $168 million improvement compared to the prior year's second quarter. These results were achieved through admissions revenue per patron growth of 7.5% or 6.2% in constant currency to an all-time record of $12.14. At the same time, food and beverage revenue per patron climbed 8.3% or 7.4% in constant currency to an all-time record of $7.95. And total revenue per patron grew 8% or 6.7% in constant currency to yet another all-time record of $22.26. Total revenue per patron is now up approximately 43% compared to pre-pandemic 2019. This is driven in a large part by an approximately 56% increase in food and beverage revenue per patron. Not only did we achieve the per patron revenue records that I just noted, we also grew our contribution margin per patron by 5.2% or 3.9% in constant currency to $14.48. Note this is approximately 48% higher than pre-pandemic 2019. And you'll recall that we calculate contribution margin as total revenue minus both film exhibition costs and food and beverage costs, and…

Thank you, Sean. I'd like to start a discussion of what comes next for AMC by first talking about some major pricing actions that we have recently taken. Showing our pro-consumer attitude, on Tuesday, July 8, and Wednesday, July 9, just a month ago, we kicked off our new 50% off, Tuesdays and Wednesdays discounted ticket pricing strategy here in the United States. Bargain hunters can now find cheap admission ticket pricing at all of our showtimes on 2 days in a week at the vast majority of our U.S. theaters. Discount Tuesdays has long been a staple in our industry. And it built up Tuesdays to being AMC's highest non-weekend attendance day of the week. New this past month, we changed our messaging, instead of it being referred to as discount Tuesdays, it's now called 50% off Tuesdays, a message that we expect will be a far stronger communication to potential bargain-seeking moviegoers than merely saying discount Tuesdays, as we've said for years. Why? Well, with our new messaging, potential guests instantly can see and instantly can understand the magnitude of the discount level that we're offering to them. And of course, it's a sizable one. More than that, though, we now have extended that same pricing philosophy to Wednesdays as well. We're doing so with the hope that just has been the case for Tuesdays for years now, we can turn Wednesdays into high patronage day for AMC in the United States. Currently by contrast, Wednesday heretofore has been our single lowest attendance day of the week. We're only 4 weeks into this important new pricing initiative, so it's too early to declare victory yet, but we definitely have seen attendance spikes, and we are highly encouraged by the starting attendance numbers that we've seen so far as…

[Operator Instructions] We'll take our first question from Eric Wold of Texas Capital Securities.

So you talked a lot about pricing Adam. You obviously mentioned the 50% off Wednesday pricing you implemented about a month ago to bring in the bargain hunters. And you also mentioned you took up or felt comfortable enough to raise prices every day of the week on Tuesday. And I think you still have surcharges on some of the blockbuster films kind of opening weekend. So I guess you're comfortable raising prices on tickets kind of in this macro environment. Maybe talk a little bit about food and beverages. What are your thoughts there once you get the consumers into the theaters? Are you taking up prices on food and beverage? Are you more focused on driving incidents and getting people to the counters instead of taking up price? Where is the focus there? And what is the best way that you found to drive incidents recently? What's worked the best there?

First of all, hello, Eric, welcome back. Maybe you're a good luck charm. You're back and like delivered a quarter to end all quarters. So first of all, on pricing of tickets. I believe that the better messaging on Tuesdays, calling it 50% off Tuesdays instead of discount Tuesdays is going to explain the level of discount, the magnitude of discount such that we're going to boost our Tuesday revenues by the change in messaging. I also believe because we're extending that Tuesday pricing philosophy, which has worked so well for like more than a decade in the movie theater business, that we have the chance to do something with Wednesdays. We don't sell any tickets on Wednesdays now -- actually now, I should say, before July 9. We didn't sell any tickets on Wednesdays. So the price we charge on Wednesday doesn't really matter when you don't sell any. And I'm actually hopeful that we can start to see Wednesday admission revenues rivaled Tuesday admission revenues, turning what is now the poorest day of the week for attendance into the strongest non-weekend day of the week for attendance that being Tuesday. And as I said, the early signs -- we can't declare victory in 4 weeks, but the early signs are quite encouraging that consumers are noticing. So that's Tuesday, Wednesday down. But Tuesday, Wednesday down as you -- as I said before and as you repeated, meant that Thursday and Mondays, we took up, and we see no pushback on the prices we've collected for tickets. We had an average price 2 weekends ago, over $14 in the United States. Those kind of eye-popping numbers given where pricing has been in recent years and where it is even today at some of our competitors. The other thing that…

If I can squeeze one in as well. One more -- you signed the amended agreement with National Cine Media a few months back to extend the amount of advertisers prior to the showtime that started at the start of July. Reports out recently that you may now be cutting that back already. I guess any comments there that is true, you are cutting it back, what's leading to that decision to do so quickly after extending it?

Well, first of all -- so the reports that you're hearing are accurate and inaccurate at the same time, and you get -- you sort of got half of it, but not all of it right. So first of all, there were 2 rationales for why we did the deal we did with National CineMedia. And it's something we resisted for many years because we don't like lengthening our preshow, and we don't particularly love using our customers with ads for third-party product. But the first rationale is our 2 largest competitors, Regal and Cinemark have been doing this for like 6 or 7 years, and we did not. And we noticed that their market share was not being hurt by these actions, and we were foregoing literally tens of millions of dollars a year. And we made this decision in the first quarter, which is a pretty bleak year -- a pretty bleak quarter for revenues and profitability. And we really thought it was irresponsible to pass up the monies that our competitors were taking. But there's a second interesting reason. When we bought Carmike in 2016, we inherited the Carmike contract with NCM's biggest competitor called Screenvision. And Screenvision is in place in a significant number of our AMC theaters. Under the terms of the Screenvision contract, the Screenvision preshow played until 5 minutes after Showtime, whereas the NCM contract called for the preshow program as it were to stop at Showtime. So already within the AMC circuit, we had a disharmony where some of our theaters, the preshow -- the preshow ads continue for 5 minutes post Showtime and the NCM theaters did not. By this -- the first change with the NCM contract is we allowed NCM to have the same 5 minutes of extra preshow…

We'll take our next question from Chad Beynon of Macquarie.

Nice quarter. I wanted to ask about just the overall portfolio, Adam. And Sean, you went through the net closures over the past couple of years. I think this was one of the first quarters where there was almost 0 net closures sequentially. So with that in mind, can you just talk about given the profit outlook and the more positive view on the industry, are we at a point where we might start seeing net adds going forward? Obviously, understanding that leases come up on an annual basis, but just kind of thinking about the portfolio and the cash flow per screen, could this start to be a floor in terms of the number of units in your portfolio.

Well, thanks for the question, Chad. So there was one really important statistic that Sean left out when he bragged about 205 closures and 65 openings. Is it 205 and 65? 203, 204, or some 200 change and 65 openings. What he didn't mention is that the 65 openings are out grossing the 204-ish closures. So we're focusing on the wrong statistic by focusing just on the number of theaters that we closed. What's more important is the profitability of the theaters that we're opening versus the profitability of theaters that we're closing. And in the case of the theaters that we closed, most of them were losing money. When you look at the theaters that we're opening, we've opened hit after hit after hit. There are theaters that we've opened like in the last few years that are amongst our highest grossing theaters in the entire United States. What come to mind, the Grove in Los Angeles, Americana brand in Los Angeles, Porter Ranch also in Los Angeles, Topanga 12 also in Los Angeles. The Grove and Americana are 2 of our 10 highest grossing theaters week in and week out. Porter Ranch and Topanga, they're in the top 25 highest grossing theaters or the top 50 highest grossing theaters out of 540 week in and week out. And as you take the collective of it all, the theaters that we're opening far outshine and they're shiny and they're new and they're in great locations today. They're far outshining the 25-year-old theaters that are somewhat more abund that might have been in bad locations today. They were good locations 25 years ago when they opened, but those locations aren't as compelling today as they once might have been at the turn of the 21st century. So again -- but…

Lastly, quickly, Sean, just on the big beautiful build benefits to CapEx generating companies. Can you just talk about, as you see it now, maybe what some of the cash benefits could be either from a cash tax standpoint or a cash shield standpoint in future years?

Sure. So obviously, as a result of that build, we get 2 key benefits. The one is the depreciation deduction and the other is the interest deduction based on EBITDA as opposed to EBIT. So that has a benefit for us. But bear in mind that we have NOLs that will run through, probably through 2026 or so. So the cash benefit will only be in future years '27, '28 and going forward from there. So it's certainly -- it's beneficial. It increases the NOLs for future cash deductions, but it's not a short-term cash benefit. It's more of a longer-term cash benefit for us.

Thank you. We have no further questions at this time. I'd be happy to return the call to Adam Aron.

Thank you, Leo. We're going to now take a couple of questions from shareholders. Sean?

Sure.

What came in from our retail investors.

Yes. So just briefly, the first question is just asking if we have any reaction to Skydance's acquisition of Paramount, that's not just closed.

Yes, we sure do have a comment about the Paramount acquisition from Skydance. First of all, we've had a very good relationship with Paramount across many generations of its leadership. I'd especially like to thank Brian Robbins and his executive team. They've been superb partners for AMC over the course of the last many years. At the same time, though, we are excited by Skydance's acquisition of Paramount because Paramount has been cash hampered in recent years, which has caused them to greenlight fewer movies than they might have liked to. It appears to us that Skydance is cash rich. And it would be our expectation that Skydance will be releasing more movies coming out of Paramount than Paramount has been releasing in recent years. You'll also recall that David Ellison is no rookie in the movie business. He's been a prime force in some of the most important movies that have come out in recent years and what especially comes to my mind is Top Gun: Maverick, which, in my mind, is the single movie that you can point to since COVID hit in 2020 that turned the movie theater industry around. It set us back on a course where studio with its $1.5 billion worldwide gross, it finally reminded various studio chiefs that the future was not only in their streaming services, but also in their theatrical releases. And that sometimes the most successful movies on streaming services were those movies that had a great theatrical release. [ Point in Case ] was the highest movie watched on Paramount Plus, Top Gun: Maverick. Why? Because it had a spectacular $1.5 billion theatrical release worldwide. So the fact that David and Skydance want to make more movies and the fact that they have experience in making really good movies. And then you can add in the fact that the new President of Skydance is going to be Jeff Shell, who used to be the Chairman of Universal Studios. And we've had a superb relationship with Jeff Shell over the past decade. And I've talked to Jeff. I know that he's excited to be back at the helm of a major studio. Well, he's got more than the studio, of course, he's got the whole enchilada, but his influence over what happens at Paramount will be profound, and we think it's going to be very good for theatrical exhibition.

Terrific. Do you want to comment about AMC distribution? There -- we just made the Eminem announcement last weekend. Anything you'd like to point out on AMC distribution and future opportunities there?

Sure. Obviously, 2 years ago, we had these massive successes with Taylor Swift and Beyonce. And we've had lots of conversations with lots of world-class artists since then, some deals got very close, but then didn't materialize. Others have happened. We did this Billie Eilish album release a year ago. We did this Eminem documentary just this weekend, which is apparently a movie beloved by his fans. It got some spectacular scores on Rotten Tomatoes, I heard. We're in several conversations right now with more world-class talent about more projects coming out as soon as 2026. It's also given us the -- again, the courage to look more broadly at how movies are distributed. And we had success in distributing some concert movies. Maybe there are some nonconert movies we could help bring into theaters as well. We'll see. The vast majority of our product is always going to come from our studio partners, of course. But I think there's opportunistic profit opportunity. There is plenty of excess capacity in the movie theater industry. It is -- I'm an old airline guy. If an airline had fewer than 75% of its seats filled, an airline marketer would have slashed his wrist. In the movie theater industry, we're -- instead, we're a church built for Easter Sunday, we only sell less than 20% of our seats in the course of any given year. There's tons of capacity. We certainly have the screens to show more product if there's more product to be made.

Terrific. And Adam, finally a question here on AI and the impact on our business and the extensive benefits. I wonder if you'd like to comment on that.

So every company in America is talking about AI. Every Board of Directors of America is talking about AI. We're no different. So we're talking about AI. And the AI revolution is happening very quickly. I know that I've completed -- personally, I've completely abandoned Google in exchange for ChatGPT. And you just see it in every aspect of our company, there's opportunity to use it. We're already using it in software development and software optimization and software testing. We're using it in image creation for marketing. We're using it for the automation and simplification of tasks here in our corporate office. We process our accounts payable using AI. We've got teams in our theaters looking at AI and how it can be used to address operational issues in our theaters. We're using AI already in demand planning for our inventory management. But like we've just scratched the surface. I really do think going forward, there'll be an opportunity for us to take care -- take advantage of the powerful AI technology to assist with our pricing, with our film scheduling, with our customer service programs and our consumer response programs. And there's more -- and the more -- which might be the most exciting of all, we've actually been talking and are in conversations right now about making small investments in some AI technology-enabled companies whose prospects are related to the movie industry related to entertainment and whose prospects are incredibly bright. And we'd like to benefit fully from the AI revolution that clearly is already at hand.

Terrific. I think that's all the questions that we have at this point.

Great. All right. Well, look, thank you, everybody, for joining us today, for staying with us. The second quarter of 2025 was one that made us very excited here at Leewood, Kansas. We delivered big numbers, almost a quintupling of our EBITDA. We were ahead of the street on just about every expectation you all had for us. And we think this is just the beginning of something that's going to happen quarter after quarter starting in the fourth quarter of 2025. Remember what I said, in the fourth quarter '24, revenues were up 18%, EBITDA tripled. In the second quarter 2025, revenue was up 35% and change. Our EBITDA was quintupled. There's enormous operating leverage in this business. If we can finally have the wind in our backs with rising industry revenues, the sky is a limit for the EBITDA that AMC can generate as a result. Thank you for joining us today. We'll talk to you in 90 days.

This does conclude the AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc. Second Quarter Earnings Webcast. You may now disconnect. And everyone, have a great day.