AMC Theaters ($AMC), the world's largest movie theater chain, is rumored to be considering bankruptcy, we learned this week. It's obvious that going to the movies has been getting less popular by the decade, if you compare ticket sales to box office returns adjusted for inflation. And having a worldwide pandemic that makes everyone stay home is certainly not going to help the movie theater business.
The biggest corporations in filmmaking have pushed back releases of summer blockbusters several months. AMC has said it plans to keep theaters closed for another 12 weeks, but considering AMC lost $149 million last year when theaters were all open, this is a major cause for concern.
Here is an interactive map of every single AMC location. These are all closed for the next three months, or potentially for good if things continue to go awry.
And here are all the AMC employees who are either furloughed, out of a job, or possibly about to be out of a job. You can see the stock has been falling even before the pandemic, and it's just hard to imagine a world where hundreds of people want to be in close contact with each other for two hours in a dark theater when so many streaming options are available in the safety of our own homes.
The number of people talking about AMC theaters dropped 89% since late March.
And to top off all the bad news, AMC's Twitter follower count has either been completely flat or just going down ever so slightly. What happens if AMC goes bankrupt? We hate to envision what the data would look like then.
About the Data:
Thinknum tracks companies using the information they post online - jobs, social and web traffic, product sales and app ratings - and creates data sets that measure factors like hiring, revenue and foot traffic. Data sets may not be fully comprehensive (they only account for what is available on the web), but they can be used to gauge performance factors like staffing and sales.