AMC Enter Hldgs Q3 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

AMC Enter Hldgs (NYSE:AMC) reported third-quarter financial results on Wednesday. The transcript from the company’s third-quarter earnings call has been provided below.

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View the webcast at https://event.on24.com/wcc/r/5534800/5A0699D363E3D3669655AE04043D376F

Summary

AMC Entertainment Holdings reported record-breaking financial results for Q3 2026, with revenue up 31.6% to $1.711 billion and adjusted EBITDA up 183.7% to $347.5 million.

The company is optimistic about future performance, expecting to be free cash flow positive for the full year 2026 and projecting a strong Q4 2026 due to a robust movie slate.

AMC has significantly improved its balance sheet by refinancing 97% of its debt, lowering its cost of capital and extending maturities to 2031 and 2033.

Strategic initiatives include enhancing loyalty programs, investing in premium auditoriums and employing AI for operational efficiencies, with a focus on optimizing theater portfolios and cost structures.

Management expressed confidence in the long-term prospects, highlighting the industry’s rebound, partnerships with major studios and continued innovation and enhancements to the guest experience.

Full Transcript

Leslie (Moderator)

Hello and welcome everyone joining today’s AMC Enter Hldgs third quarter earnings webcast. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, you will have the opportunity to ask questions during the question-and-answer session. To register to ask a question at any time, please press star and one on your telephone keypad. Please note this call is being recorded. We are standing by should you need any assistance. It is now my pleasure to turn the meeting over to John Merriwether, Vice President, Capital Markets and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

John Merriwether (Vice President, Capital Markets and Investor Relations)

Thank you, Leslie. Good afternoon. I’d like to welcome everyone to AMC’s third quarter 2026 earnings webcast. Joining 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 these 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 and free cash flow, 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 afternoon. 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 later today.

With that, I’ll turn the call over to Adam.

Adam Aron (Chief Executive Officer)

Thank you, John. Good afternoon one and all, and welcome to the Q3 2026 AMC Enter Hldgs quarterly earnings webcast. This just completed July to September quarter can only be described as the quarter to beat all quarters, the best quarterly results on revenues and adjusted EBITDA since our company’s founding in 1920. Let’s cut right to the chase with AMC’s stunning financial results. Here are AMC’s consolidated global numbers for Q3 2026: Revenue up 31.6% to $1.711 billion, some $411 million better than last year’s third quarter. Net earnings $109.3 million compared to a loss of $298.2 million in the same period a year ago, a $407.5 million improvement. Adjusted net earnings of $116.9 million, a $227 million improvement over last year’s third quarter. Adjusted EBITDA up 183.7% to $347.5 million, nearly triple last year’s third quarter result of $122.5 million.

Net cash provided by operations was $176.6 million, a $191.5 million improvement over last year’s Q3. Free cash flow in the quarter of $109.3 million, also up more than $190 million over Q3 2025. Our cash reserves at the end of Q3 were $751.9 million, not counting the $40 million of restricted cash, up 105.5% compared to the same period last year. Let me reiterate just one of those numbers: $347.5 million of adjusted EBITDA for AMC in Q3 of 2026. For example, last quarter, the second quarter of 2026, we also broke revenue and adjusted EBITDA records for AMC that had stood for seven and nine years, respectively. This quarter, Q3 of 2026, for the second consecutive quarter we broke those records and set new records yet again. It’s no wonder today, therefore, that we all are all smiles in Leawood, Kansas.

And when you realize that we showed progress in the first quarter of 2026 and set new records for each of the second and third quarters of 2026, our nine months January to September global results also are so extraordinarily encouraging. Revenues of $4.353 billion, up 22.3%, an increase of $793 million over the same period last year. Net loss was $19.2 million compared to a loss of $505 million, a $485.8 million improvement. Adjusted net earnings of $26.9 million, a $387 million year-over-year increase.

Adjusted EBITDA for the nine months of $707.2 million. Let me say that again: $707.2 million, up 178.1%, an improvement year over year of $453 million. It just makes me so happy to say it again because it just feels so good to do so. AMC’s adjusted EBITDA for the nine months was up $453 million. Also net cash provided by operations of $284.5 million, a $530 million improvement. Free cash flow for the nine months of $124.7 million, which gives us confidence to say to you today that we expect that AMC will be free cash flow positive for the full year 2026.

We posted these satisfying results because of so many disparate accomplishments all coming together: a resurgent industry-wide box office that started producing hit movie after hit movie in March of 2026 and every month since; the appeal of AMC and Odeon’s industry-leading loyalty and subscription programs; the vast and growing number of our Premium Large Format, Extra Large Format, and laser-projection-equipped screens; increased market share both domestically and in Europe; the creativity displayed in our food, beverage, and merchandise offerings; our keen understanding of pricing strategies both in leveraging times of peak demand and providing options to satisfy bargain hunters when appropriate; and also a key driver, our disciplined cost management both with respect to operating costs and capital expenditures. You could sum it all up by saying that AMC and Odeon have superbly executed, department after department at our various headquarters locations and in our theaters, leading to compelling contribution-per-patron metrics.

Over the past several years, we’ve tried to convey to you that there is considerable operating leverage inherent in our business at AMC. When our revenues rise, our EBITDA can soar, and that clearly has been demonstrated this year in 2026. For the first nine months of 2026, approximately 57% of our incremental revenues flowed through to the adjusted EBITDA line. Indeed, in Q3 of 2026, revenues increased 32%. Adjusted EBITDA increased 184%. For the first nine months of 2026, our revenues increased 22%, our adjusted EBITDA increased 178%.

Our 2026 operating results obviously have been stellar, but importantly, we’ve made strides in righting our balance sheet as well. Not everyone realizes that since 2020 AMC has repaid around $2 billion of debt and deferred theater rent obligations. And on October 5, AMC also completed another balance sheet action that was nothing less than transformative for our company. We refinanced 97% of our debt, greatly simplifying our capital structure, lowering our cost of capital, gaining credit rating agency upgrades, and extending maturities to late in 2031 and 2033, five to seven years away.

So what does this all mean for AMC? In our opinion, it means this: after six long years of navigating AMC through uncharted waters, we can finally say with relief that we have brought our ship into port. While others in our industry suffered financial collapse, AMC instead has persevered. AMC is now in an industry-leading position, currently producing free cash flow, enjoying sizable cash reserves, and while not yet rising all the way to the ultimate target for our desired leverage levels, nonetheless possessing a more normal balance sheet.

While we will continue to strive to pay down debt and further reduce leverage, we believe that any future press article referring to our being overly debt-laden is mindlessly in error. And while we will continue to utilize equity financings when it makes sense, going forward, groundless fears of endless share dilution will come only from those looking in the rearview mirror, not the front windshield of the AMC auto. In its simplest terms, AMC functioning in a $10 billion-plus box office environment is a very different animal from one that was trapped in a $7 to $9 billion box office environment, as was the case in the past four years, or for that matter, a $2 to $9 billion box office over the past six years. What you are seeing now is a company proving quarter after quarter what it can achieve when an inspired movie slate combines with a powerful fleet of movie theaters, adding our years of perseverance, preparation, innovation, and disciplined execution.

And we believe that our financial results demonstrate that AMC is in a class of its own. We realize that for years now the skeptics have been repeating the conventional wisdom and writing off AMC’s final chapter. But they were wrong. Time and again our team at AMC Enter Hldgs and at Odeon have adapted, delivered, and prevailed. With that, I’m now going to pass the call on to Sean Goodman who will discuss our financial results in more detail, and then I’ll come back to further address the brightness of the picture at AMC. Sean.

Sean Goodman (Chief Financial Officer)

Thank you, Adam. And good afternoon, everyone. As Adam noted, for the second quarter in a row we get to announce the highest quarterly revenue and adjusted EBITDA in our 106-year history. The results were driven by more than just a surging box office; they also reflect the thoughtful steps that we’ve consistently taken over the last few years to really enhance our loyalty programs, invest in premium auditoriums, grow our food and beverage business, optimize our theater portfolio and cost structure, and strengthen the balance sheet.

During the third quarter, nearly 75 million guests visited our theaters around the world. In the United States, admissions revenue grew by 29.9%, and that’s approximately 300 basis points ahead of the impressive industry box office growth of 27%. And in Europe, our attendance increased by a remarkable 41.5%, or approximately 1,000 basis points above third quarter industry attendance growth. In our European markets, we set new third quarter records for consolidated admissions revenue per patron, food and beverage revenue per patron, and total revenue per patron.

These records helped drive total third quarter year-over-year revenue growth of 31.6%, with domestic revenue growth of 29% and international revenue growth of 40%. And thanks to our ongoing initiatives and the operating leverage inherent in our business, our adjusted EBITDA margin for the quarter increased by more than 1,000 basis points to a record of 20.3%. We saw strength on both sides of the Atlantic with U.S. adjusted EBITDA growing 147% to $275 million, while Europe delivered adjusted EBITDA of $72.5 million for an impressive increase of 542%.

Through the first nine months of 2026, AMC Enter Hldgs generated a record $4.35 billion of revenue and adjusted EBITDA reached a record of $707 million. We’ve said before that we don’t need the box office to return to pre-pandemic levels in order to get back to pre-pandemic levels of adjusted EBITDA, and that is because of the work we’ve done over the last few years to make AMC Enter Hldgs a significantly more profitable business. And to illustrate the transformation, let’s compare the first nine months of 2026 to the same period in 2019.

In 2026, the North American box office was approximately 7.5% lower and our global attendance 26.5% lower than in the same period in 2019. Yet despite significantly fewer guests, a lower box office and seven years of inflationary cost pressures, we delivered 51.6%, or $241 million, more adjusted EBITDA in 2026 than in 2019, and we’re continuing to take actions to optimize the business. During the third quarter we closed another three theatres and at the same time we introduced 10 new premium large format auditoriums and 24 XL, or extra-large, format auditoriums. So since 2020 we’ve now closed 228 locations and opened 66 for a net reduction of 162 theaters, or approximately 16% of our global circuit. This optimization of our fleet is highly beneficial to our business and our shareholders because, not surprisingly, the 66 new theaters in desirable locations generate far more theater-level cash flow than the 228 theaters that we’ve closed.

And over the same period, what we’ve done is added 72 premium large formats and 217 XL or extra-large auditoriums, increasing the premium or enhanced auditorium options available to our guests by more than 50%. Let’s now turn to our financial position and the balance sheet. Our balance sheet priorities remain to maintain sufficient liquidity, reduce our borrowing costs, lower financial leverage, and provide capital to invest in high-return projects that enhance the theatrical experience even more. During the third quarter, we repaid $125.5 million of our 6.125% senior secured notes that were due in 2027. After that repayment, we ended September with $751.9 million of cash on hand.

As you know, quarterly cash flow is significantly impacted by the level of working capital, which will fluctuate with the timing of the film release schedule, studio film rent payments, rent and other vendor payments. As Adam noted, we do expect to generate positive free cash flow for the full year 2026, and this would be after net capital expenditures of between $200 and $235 million. This brings me to the refinancing that we just completed on October 5th. The new debt consists of three components. First, $2 billion of first-lien senior secured notes bearing interest at 8.875% and maturing in October 2031. Second, an $850 million first-lien term facility priced at SOFR plus 450 basis points, and this also matures in October 2031. And third, a $1.12 billion senior secured loan bearing interest at 11.25% and maturing in October 2033.

These transactions substantially extend our debt maturities, they simplify our capital structure and reduce the average interest rate on our debt. In summary, three things defined this quarter. First, record financial results. Second, free cash flow generation and the expectation of being free cash flow positive for the year. And third, a strengthening balance sheet. Nearly all of our debt now matures in late 2031 or 2033. Our capital structure is simpler, our cost of debt is lower and our leverage today is significantly lower than it was at the end of 2025. And with that, I’ll hand the call back over to Adam.

Adam Aron (Chief Executive Officer)

Thank you, Sean. I want to touch on five key topics before turning to your questions. First, as proud as we are of our Q3 results, I should also point out that we are also quite excited by our prospects for Q4 of this year. For the month of October, the domestic industry box office was up approximately 35% and the majority of the quarter’s box office is still ahead of us. There are a flood of highly anticipated movies being released in November and December.

Some of my personal favorites are I Play Rocky, Wild Horse 9, The Further Misadventures of Cliff Booth, and Mr. Irrelevant. And then there’s the blockbuster holiday slate, including Warner Brothers’ Dune Part 3, Disney and Marvel’s Avengers: Doomsday, Lionsgate’s The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, and Sony’s Jumanji: Open World, among others. These titles will cap what is sure to be the best domestic box office in seven years, one that we would expect will easily cross $10 billion and potentially wind up mostly much more than that.

Second, it was fortuitous that as a key aspect of our AMC go plan, in which AMC got off our heels and started playing on offense again, that AMC aggressively embraced the offering of premium experiences in our theaters in the U.S. Our premium large format screens and extra large format screens represent 8% of our total U.S. screen count. In 3Q26, those 8% of our U.S. screens generated fully 31% of our U.S. admissions revenues, and those PLF and XLF revenues grew by an astounding 62% year over year versus the third quarter of 2025.

We did well across the board, but our hats off especially go to our friends and partners at IMAX who have been enjoying such enormous success this year, with AMC having about half of all the IMAX screens in the U.S. and for that matter more than 90% of the Dolby Cinema screens in the U.S., not to mention our Prime and XL screens. In addition, no one else in our industry comes close to the count of premium screens that are offered by AMC. Add to that AMC’s further embrace of laser projection in the U.S. AMC now has 3,976 laser projection equipped auditoriums, 58% of our total U.S. screen count.

And talking about premium offerings, everything worked well in Q3 of 2026. Our U.S. 3D admissions, which carry a price premium, their revenue grew by 43% versus Q3 of last year. Globally, it is the exact same story. In the U.S. and Europe combined, AMC and Odeon now have 226 IMAX screens, 187 Dolby Cinema screens, 146 house-branded PLF screens, primarily Prime at AMC in the U.S., iSense at our Odeon cinemas in Europe. We have deployed 19 CJ ScreenX and 4DX auditoriums and 217 XL screens.

AMC and Odeon now offer nearly 800 PLF and XLF screens. That is more than quadruple the number of premium screens offered by AMC Enter Hldgs when I joined this company 10 years ago and none of our competitors are anywhere close to us. Third, let me turn to an industry development of real consequence to the movie business. Earlier in October, Skydance, the owner of Paramount, completed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. The combined company brings together two storied studios whose movies have entertained generations and generations and generations of audiences. As you know, AMC has been a vocal champion for this transaction earlier this year. Back in April, we were one of the very first entities to make our support of Skydance clear.

We did so because we valued the sincere commitments being made by David Ellison and his Paramount team: more movies coming to theaters and longer exclusive theatrical windows, which translate to more time for those movies to appear exclusively in movie theaters on the big screen. We are confident that Skydance will do everything in its power to create and deliver appealing movies under both the Warner and Paramount brands going forward. Third, it is not just Skydance’s Warner and Paramount who are committed to releasing quality movies in movie theaters. Disney and Universal continue to shine. Sony is still euphoric about its staggering success with Spider-Man: No Way Home, as is Lionsgate happy with Michael and its coming film in the Hunger Games franchise opening this month. Amazon has a full slate of movies now. They started the year big with Project Hail Mary and I predict they have another winner on their hands with a soon-to-open I Play Rocky.

I loved it and I encourage every single one of you to see it. And we have been so impressed too by the films of smaller players, including A24, Angel, Black Bear, Neon, Bleecker Street, Falling Forward, GKIDS and Fathom, among others. I am encouraged as well by AMC’s growing partnership with Netflix. In the fourth quarter of 2026, AMC will play four different Netflix movies in our theaters: La Bola Negra, Mosquito Bowl, and The Further Misadventures of Cliff Booth.

In 2027, we have two Netflix movies already on the calendar and importantly, they both carry a full theatrical window: In Narnia and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. We are actively working harmoniously with Netflix to do more together with them in 2027 and beyond. Fourth on this webcast, I have declared that AMC has finally emerged from the storm cloud created by COVID. So it makes sense to take a moment just to step back and reflect on the extraordinary journey that AMC has traveled since then. I take you back to March of 2020, when the world as we knew it changed. Our theaters were all shuttered. In a week, our revenues totally evaporated and disappeared, and AMC suddenly faced a crisis unlike anything that any of us would ever have envisioned.

The record of what happened thereafter is remarkable. We figured out how to slash costs and came up with new ways to drive revenue growth. Since March of 2020, the capital markets history of AMC reflects more than 130 separately dated actions, including nearly 100 debt transactions and more than two dozen equity transactions. We raised capital, we refinanced debt, we exchanged debt, we repurchased debt, we extended maturities, we sold assets, we created new securities.

And at various points along the way, we repeatedly found innovative and sometimes unconventional solutions to problems that others said were unsolvable. Some of those decisions were difficult, some were complicated, some were unpopular. When liquidity was paramount, we raised capital. When maturities needed to be addressed, we addressed them. When opportunities existed to reduce or restructure debt, we pursued them. And when entirely new solutions were required, we created them.

AMC did not have an option to take an easy road. Over and over again, we took the difficult road, both because we always believed it was the right road, and also sometimes because it was the only path forward that looked to us to be workable. Take it all together. In short, at AMC Enter Hldgs, we successfully threaded the needle. And finally, fifth, I’d like to conclude by saying this, that my confidence in AMC is resolute. For no company is it always a sheer straight line upwards. But looking ahead, I could not be more bullish about the long-term prospects for our company. Moviegoing begets more moviegoing. Attendance in our theaters increased by 19% for the first nine months of 2026, January–September year over year, and in Q3, it increased by 28% compared to the third quarter a year ago.

The sources who I trust in Hollywood also are confident about the movie industry’s rebound. Analysts are forecasting 2027 to be another box office year, around $10 billion or so domestically. And many of those in the movie industry are especially optimistic about the 2028 movie slate, one that we believe has every possibility of eclipsing that of 2026. Accordingly, given my confidence, I own and have a financial interest in a meaningful, in a truly sizable number of AMC shares and I have not sold a single AMC share since January of 2022.

To the contrary, many of you will recall that earlier this year, back in the spring, I bought additional shares of AMC stock. As I said, my confidence in AMC is resolute. With that, Shawn, let’s turn to questions from security analysts and Femar shareholders.

OPERATOR

Thank you. If you would like to ask a question at this time, please press star one on your telephone keypad. To leave the queue at any time, press star two. Once again, that is star one to ask a question. And we will take our first question from Mike Hickey with StoneX. Please go ahead.

Mike Hickey (Analyst)

Hey, Adam, Shawn, John. Great quarter, guys. Great job on the financing and congratulations, Adam, on the completed turnaround.

Adam Aron (Chief Executive Officer)

Thank you, Mike.

Mike Hickey (Analyst)

And I think my favorite data point from your incredible preamble is positive free cash flow for 2026. I mean, given what you guys have gone through, the industry has gone through, that’s one hell of a statement. So again, congratulations. And I guess now that you sort of debunked any idea that you wouldn’t be a going concern, Adam, how does your strategy change now, if at all? And how do you see the next chapter of AMC unfolding over the next three to five years?

Adam Aron (Chief Executive Officer)

That is precisely what we talked about at our board meeting last week. Mike, going back to your comment about free cash flow, it is so satisfying to be where we are today. But when I look at our business, I think the prospects continue to be so bright. Look at the operating leverage that we delivered this year in the quarter. As you know, revenue is up 32% but adjusted EBITDA 187%. Because we’ve been so tight on capital expenditures the last six years, so many growth opportunities within our theater network became obvious to us, but we weren’t in a position to pursue them.

And I think the first answer to your question is there is going to be an intense, an intense focus on continuing to unleash the earnings potential, the increase in earnings potential from our existing industry-leading fleet of theaters. So I say that’s item one. Item two. We’re just beginning to tap the benefits that AI can offer our company to make us more efficient and more effective. As just one example of many, we have a project underway in Europe right now where we are using AI to program which movies go into which auditoriums in our theaters. The financial implications of this, if it works, could be so significant. Let me remind you, all new movies come out every week. So we program movies every week.

And not everyone realizes this, but in a typical movie theater, in a typical multiplex, there are four to seven different screen sizes and seat count sizes in our auditoriums. And when a movie opens up, when demand is highest, they tend to be in the largest auditoriums with the most number of seats. And over the course of their run, they trade down to medium size and smaller auditoriums. Well, we now and for the past century have been doing all that programming of our theaters manually by humans every single week at 10,000 screens with the movies that they’re showing.

You would think, logically, that if programmed right, the artificial intelligence, with machine learning, that we ought to be able to outproduce the programming on these auditoriums in their different sizes with even marginally better effectiveness than with a lot of people scattered all over the world doing that same work. Not only are there labor savings, but theoretically the programming will be tighter, will marry the right movie to the right auditorium better, and our admissions revenues are so high that even improvements of a few percent will translate to significant increases in EBITDA.

So those are just two of the areas where we’ll be paying a lot of attention. And there also are other ideas that are at the tip of our fingertips that we’ll be exploring in the months and years ahead.

Mike Hickey (Analyst)

Adam, when you talked about 28, I think film slate, I think you said those in the

Adam Aron (Chief Executive Officer)

Well, we—you know, the difficulty in predicting film slates. If you ask any studio on a Wednesday that’s opening a new film on Friday how it’s going to do by Sunday, they don’t actually know. Exactly. And what you’re asking me to do is not forecast one movie four days out, but the entire slate 14 months out. What I am confident of is that ’27 is going to be a good year. I said in my opening remarks that most forecasters are calling it to be, you know, in the neighborhood of $10 billion, which is such a striking change from where we’ve been the last four years, trapped between $7 and $9 billion. Well, is it—exactly what is ’27 going to be versus ’26? They’ll probably be pretty close to each other, but we don’t actually know exactly how ’26 is going to end up.

It will depend a lot on the December movies, with four big ones coming out, as you know, in Hunger Games, Dune, three Avengers, Doomsday, and Jumanji. So I can barely tell you exactly where ’26 is going to be, let alone where all of ’27 is going to be. But we do think ’27 will be a good year, a solid year. We’re going to—we ended the third quarter with a ton of cash. We’re going to end the fourth quarter with a ton of cash. We’re very confident, looking ahead, that ’27 will be an acceptable year.

And I, for one, think ’28 is going to be a stellar year.

OPERATOR

Thank you. We will take our next question from Eric Wald with Texas Capital. Please go ahead.

Eric Wald (Analyst)

Thanks. Good afternoon. Congrats to all you guys again for a great quarter. Sean, a couple questions. I guess, one, you obviously talked about—you guys talked about the impressive operating leverage you had in the quarter and the year as attendance and box office has improved. I guess thinking beyond box office drivers, where do you think you have additional expense levers that you can pull to drive further leverage as box office and attendance continues to improve next couple years?

And kind of dovetailing on that, my second question is, as you look at the current theater portfolio, I know as you analyze each of them as kind of leases come up for renewal, any sense of how many theaters or screens right now kind of fall below that cash flow positive threshold that you’d want to see, or return threshold you want to see, that could be closed next couple years to drive underlying performance even more?

Sean Goodman (Chief Financial Officer)

Thanks, Eric. On the theatres, we have about 10% of our theatre leases come up for renewal each year. That’s around 85 or so leases that come up for renewal each year. And when that happens, we have an opportunity to renegotiate those leases. If the theatre is loss-making today, can we renegotiate the leases to make that theater more profitable? Then we’d continue to keep that theatre. If we’re unable to do so, then we would look to close that theatre because we can rather reinvest our resources in more profitable theatres, new theatres.

So we have that opportunity. We haven’t disclosed the number of theatre locations that are cash flow negative. But that’s not really the key driver here. The driver is where can we renegotiate leases or close leases and open new locations to improve our overall profitability, to improve our KPIs, et cetera. And we’ve been very effective in doing that and we’ll continue to do that going forward. As you rightly mentioned, we’ve been able to show significant operating leverage as attendance has increased.

We will continue to do that. Adam just spoke about some of the opportunities we have with respect to improving forecasting. As we get our forecasting more accurate at individual theatre level, then you get benefits in terms of staffing, you get benefits in terms of inventory for food and beverage. And that really improves our food and beverage profitability and that improves our labour efficiency as well. And it improves our ability to get guests to the concession stand.

So we’re looking at that all the time and I expect we will continue to see those operating leverage opportunities going forward.

Adam Aron (Chief Executive Officer)

Got it. And Eric, I’ll just add, I mean, like, we’ve squeezed so much cost out of this business, but we’re getting pretty good at squeezing costs out of the business. We have an exercise going on right now in Europe to reduce overhead above the theater portfolio, and that has potential to save more than $10 million of operating costs. So there are just so many levers to pull, and we’ve been pulling them for years, and we’re going to continue to pull them.

So I think you’re going to find that we’re going to continue to be a tight manager of our cost, both our operating costs and our capital expenditures, going forward.

Eric Wald (Analyst)

That was actually—that dovetails into my second question on CapEx. It obviously sounded like you’ve been fairly conservative with your cash over the past couple of years and you kind of navigated the balance sheet and the kind of the industry recovery with the opportunities out there. Are we looking at the possibility of net CapEx increasing in the coming years? Do you think it stays relatively flattish?

Sean Goodman (Chief Financial Officer)

We’ve guided to $200 to $235 million for 2026. We’re still working through our budget and planning for 2027. I would expect, if the box office continues to perform at these levels and given our operating profit and our free cash flow generation, we’re likely to be in the mid to high end of that range in 2027. We have, as we’ve mentioned before, a significant number of very high return opportunities that we look at, and, you know, that creates real opportunities for the business and improves our profitability overall.

But our CapEx levels—what I think we’ve been very good at doing is increasing CapEx when we’re able to do so, when we find those high return opportunities, and really cutting back on our CapEx when we’ve needed to over the past six years or so. So we’ll continue to do that, but we’ll certainly be taking advantage of opportunities that exist within the business. One other thing I’ll mention is our CapEx spend—net CapEx spend—for AMC, in effect, we’re spending quite a bit more than that because we get incentives from our technology providers, from our landlords, that allow us to effectively be spending more than that $200 to $235 million range.

So actually, the amount of money going into the business in terms of enhancing the business is quite nicely higher than our net CapEx spend. And I think we’ll continue to have those opportunities.

Eric Wald (Analyst)

Perfect. Thank you, Bob.

OPERATOR

Thank you. Thank you. At this time, there are no further questions in the queue. I will now turn the meeting back to Sean Goodman.

Sean Goodman (Chief Financial Officer)

Thank you, operator. And, Adam, we’ll just take one question because we’re getting close to the top of the hour. We’ll just take one question from our investors, which question relates—and we’ve spoken about this a lot on the call—related to growth opportunities. Where are the growth opportunities for us in terms of investing in our fleet and investing in the guest experience?

Adam Aron (Chief Executive Officer)

Thank you, Sean. Thank you to our shareholders for the question. This is something that is quite exciting for me to talk about because there is so much opportunity to improve the experience that we offer to our guests. And it’s been our experience that when we make our product better, consumers reward us with increased patronage. And as you know, 3/5 of the incremental dollar flows through all the way to the adjusted EBITDA line. We’ve already pushed the button on putting in new seating in around a dozen of our theaters in the U.S. and Europe. And these are some of our highest-profile theaters, like Disney Springs in Orlando, the Grove in Americana in Los Angeles, among several others, where the theaters are enormously successful today. But we’re going to be replacing traditional seats with our AMC Club Rockers. We put in these Club Rockers at Burbank in L.A. and Empire in Lincoln Square in Manhattan.

And routinely after we put these Club Rockers in place, those three theaters, week in and week out, are often the three highest-grossing theaters out of the 535 that we have in operation in the United States. And we’re going to put those same seats into another 10 to 12 theaters in the U.S., and you know, on this call, we’ve talked about some of our theaters that are not very many anymore because we closed so many. But we talk about theaters that have either negative cash flow or no cash flow.

We’ve got theaters that we manage right now that do $6 million of EBITDA, $12 million of EBITDA at a single theater location. And in many cases those theaters are operating with 10-, 15-, and 20-year-old seats. And the Club Rockers that are going in, replacing them, are wider, more padded, more comfortable, in some cases heated. We often put in more legroom. They look great because they have a black leather feel to them. And these seats are going into a whole bunch of our highest-grossing, highest theater cash-flow-producing theaters.

That’s only going to cause, in our optimistic view, only going to cause those theaters to be even more successful going forward. Another example of a growth initiative that I’m so excited by: we have a theater in Manhattan, in New York City, Orpheum 7. That was a Loews theater that AMC bought 20 years ago. The only thing that we’ve done to that theater in the last 20 years is let 20 years of dirt pile up. We tried to clean it, but 20 years is 20 years. That theater right now is being gutted to the studs. And by February or March it will reopen as the AMC Upper East Side 7.

It will be an all-new interior. It will be like we’re opening a brand-new theater, and we’ll be doing it at 86th Street and 3rd Avenue. When Sean and I, when the two of us toured the theater with Dan Ellis, our Executive VP of Operations, a year back, we just walked out the front door of that existing theater and looked around, and in every direction, in every direction, in every little eyesight that you can think of, there’s a 20- to 30-story apartment building surrounding this theater on all sides.

Well, they haven’t been going to Orpheum 7 because it was not worthy of their patronage. But I can tell you that the AMC Upper East Side 7 will be very much worthy of their patronage. And I’m expecting the attendance will soar, the theater-level cash flow will soar. And we have opportunities like this in many locations around the country. So our attention to looking at our fleet of theaters—where can we improve, where can we offer the guest a better experience, and where in turn can that translate to higher attendance, higher revenues, higher EBITDA? That is our keen focus and attention, and I think will produce great returns and be a key factor in our ongoing success in the years ahead. With that, I suppose we’re at the end. So I would just like to tell everybody thank you for attending and participating on today’s call.

I can promise you that the execution at AMC Enter Hldgs will continue with keen focus. Our imagineering, as Disney famously called it over decades past, will be very much evident at AMC Enter Hldgs. Our commitment to innovation and progress will continue at AMC Enter Hldgs, and we hope to produce the kind of stellar operating results going forward that were very much at evidence in Q3 of 2026. With that, thank you one and all. It’s going to be a great couple of months ahead in the movies.

Go see I Play Rocky, and I just bet, I bet just a few of you, a few million of you maybe, are going to be seeing Dune 3 and Avengers Doomsday in December. Thank you one and all. Thanks for joining us today.

OPERATOR

Thank you. This brings us to the end of today’s meeting. We appreciate your time and participation. You may now disconnect.

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