Six Flags Entertainment Q3 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Six Flags Entertainment (NYSE:FUN) reported third-quarter financial results on Thursday. The transcript from the company’s third-quarter earnings call has been provided below.

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Summary

Six Flags Entertainment reported a 1.4% increase in same-park net revenues to $1.17 billion and a 1.1% increase in adjusted EBITDA to $493 million, maintaining a 42% margin.

The company experienced a challenging October due to weather impacts and a tragic incident at Six Flags Over Georgia, which affected attendance, leading to a softer-than-expected fourth quarter outlook.

Strategic initiatives include enhancing guest experience, expanding passholder network, optimizing park portfolio, and maintaining disciplined capital allocation. They are actively reviewing parks and real estate for potential sales to unlock value and reduce debt.

Operational highlights include improved ride uptime to 90.3%, a 7% increase in active pass base, and significant cross-park visits. They also reported improved profitability with adjusted EBITDA up nearly 11% for the first nine months.

Management remains focused on safety, launching a comprehensive safety review, and is committed to building a performance culture with park-level accountability and stronger commercial capabilities.

Full Transcript

OPERATOR

Participants are in listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. Please note that this conference call is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to Tom Hennessey, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations.

Tom Hennessey (Senior Vice President of Investor Relations)

Thank you, Operator, and good morning, everyone. Before we begin, I would like to point everyone to our third quarter 2026 earnings release and supplemental presentation, which were released this morning. Both can be found in the Investors section of the Six Flags website at www.sixflags.com. Some of our comments will be forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. Forward-looking statements, which are usually identified by the use of words such as “will,” “expect,” “should,” or other similar phrases, are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from what we expect. We refer you to our SEC filings for a more detailed discussion of the risks that could impact our future operating results and financial condition.

During the call, we will discuss our non-GAAP measures, which we believe can be useful in evaluating the company’s operating performance. These measures should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for our financial results prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation of these measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measure is available in our third quarter 2026 earnings release and our supplemental information. One additional point on the basis of comparison: as made in our materials issued today and on this call, we will refer to our results on a same-park basis, which excludes the seven parks sold on April 6, 2026, and the park in Bowie, Maryland that closed after the 2025 season. From all periods presented, unless we say otherwise, year-over-year comparisons today are on that same-park basis.

Joining me today are John Riley, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Ash Walia, Chief Financial Officer, who will take you through our prepared remarks. We will then open the call to questions. With that, I will turn the call over to John.

John

Thanks, Ash. What gives me confidence is what I see across our parks. Roughly 95,000 full-time and seasonal team members who show up every day with passion to create fun, thrills, and lifetime memories for our guests. We know confidence is earned and we intend to keep earning it quarter by quarter. Thank you to our teams and thank you for your support. With that, operator, please open the lines for questions.

OPERATOR

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star one. Again, we ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality. If you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. The first question comes from the line of Steve Azinski with Stifel.

Steve, your line is open. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of David Katz with Jefferies. David, your line is open.

Steve Azinski (Analyst at Stifel)

Yeah. Hey guys. Good morning. So, so John or Ash, maybe, maybe I’m reading too much into this, but, you know, to me it sounds like you’re more open to, you know, to potentially selling or shutting down additional parks versus, you know, where your commentary was, you know, let’s call it three months ago. You know, am I thinking about that the right way? And if I am, you know, wondering what maybe you guys, you know, what made you change your mind or your thought process versus just a couple months ago.

And if we think about lowering your park base, I mean, do you guys, do you guys actually have a number in mind that you’d want to get to? Meaning 34 parks goes down to X or Y, or what that number could look like. Thanks.

John

Hey Steve, it’s John. I’ll take that. So when we commented on this at the last call, the response was that we didn’t have anything underway for the operating season. And that really was a question of the timing and where we were in the season and a real focus on execution and on delivering for our expanded pass base and continuing to push the expansion of our pass and membership base. We’re happy with that result. That said, we do believe there’s opportunity for further portfolio optimization. And now that the bulk of the season has passed, those discussions are underway. And, you know, we’re not going to quantify that in terms of a number of parks. What I can tell you is we’ve done a lot of work to strategize, categorize our parks in terms of values to our strategies going forward. Things like expanding the pass base and regional membership, which parks are in the most critical networks.

We’re also looking at accretion or improvement to our leverage ratio. Where would that have the biggest impact? So, you know, it’s one of many measures we’re taking to strengthen the company. We’ll give you more specifics as we go forward.

Steve Azinski (Analyst at Stifel)

Okay, gotcha. Thanks, John. And then if we think about the long-term goal of getting margins into the mid-30s, wondering what long term maybe means to you, just trying to understand how long that might take and then maybe also help us think about some of the drivers of what’s going to improve that margin improvement going forward.

John

Yeah, Steve, thanks. So we’re pleased with our progress thus far this year. We have some green shoots and we have about 200 basis points in improvement. The way we think about that, we’re not going to guide today in terms of a year target. And, you know, as we go forward, we’ll try to provide more color on these. But what I would say is we expect we can get about halfway there on cost work. I mean, Ash mentioned in his earlier comments that we had around 70 million in cost savings, offset by some inflation and other factors.

We’re pleased with our early progress and we’re building an organization that can more reliably deliver that every year, I think, as he alluded. But the way we see it is we can get about halfway there on cost base and then the improvement in the revenue—you know, this business scales up very well—the improvement in the revenue should get us the rest of the way there.

Steve Azinski (Analyst at Stifel)

Okay, thanks, John. Appreciate it.

David Katz (Analyst at Jefferies)

Hi, good morning. Thank you for taking my question. I wanted to just get your latest thoughts on the, you know, increasing pass base. Right. Presumably with, you know, single-day visitation, you know, moving down. How do you look at the balance or the equilibrium between those and the dynamics that it implies, you know, for per caps, for, you know, visibility—obviously, you know, all of the different parts to it. You know, obviously we’ve seen that dynamic elsewhere in our coverage and, you know, what it implies for the long term.

So I’d love some little more depth of thoughts on that. Thanks.

John

Yeah, thanks, David. This is John, I’ll take that. So in terms of the sort of increase in pass and membership base and potential impact on share of total tickets, this is the way we look at it. First, we’re here to maximize total revenue, and so we may, as we trade some people up, lower the per-visit per cap, but we’re happy to take the extra visits and the higher total revenue, increasing the total value per guest. We’re working on this in two different ways, and we’ve strengthened our marketing and our commercial engines within the company. The structure of the products, the trade-up, which we’re seeing tremendous results. The regional visitation is something that our commercial team is driving deliberately along with the marketing team, and we’re seeing results. But what I will say is our marketing team has also made a lot of progress in the last months on our marketing technology infrastructure that’s going to allow us to market in a more targeted way, a more personal way with personas and different guests that we haven’t messaged to before.

So we think we can do both over time. We think we can grow single day and, over time, we can grow pass through the capabilities that we’re building in marketing. And we have traded a few points from single-day tickets—about three points—to pass and membership. But we feel good about the trade-off overall because it’s growing total revenue, and we feel good that our marketing and commercial engines are going to be able to manage this as we go forward.

David Katz (Analyst at Jefferies)

Right. And as my follow-up, this may be for Ash. You know, there’s been such a dynamic debate over CapEx levels across the company—obviously that predates, you know, you all. How do you feel about the sustainability of, you know, your maintenance CapEx levels so far and, you know, how do we think about a total CapEx budget from a long-term perspective? I can recall, you know, us modeling like a 9–10% level. Is that what you think is required in this business on an ongoing basis?

Ash

Yeah, you know, thank you. You know, one of the things that I shared in my prepared remarks was our very rigorous approach to capital allocation. So we have multiple projects that we look at and evaluate, and we try to prioritize them based on the return that they’re going to deliver to us. And then what I said is that all the projects that are not passing that hurdle are put back into the pipeline to compete in the next year. When I look at CapEx, the CapEx is in two components. One is our growth CapEx and the other one is our infrastructure CapEx. The infrastructure CapEx includes things like maintenance, safety, security. That’s part of the infrastructure piece that usually ranges between 20% to 30% of our total CapEx. It depends on timing. It also depends on the mix of the growth CapEx. And we continue to look at it; we’ll continue to refine it. But right now, where we are and how we see the levels that we have, we are pleased with the levels of capital that we are able to invest in the business between growth and between infrastructure.

OPERATOR

Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Arpine Kocharian with UBS. Your line is open.

Arpine Kocharian (Analyst at UBS)

Hi, thank you so much for taking my question, and I apologize—I’m hopping between calls today, so it’s very possible you’ve already addressed this, but I was hoping you could dissect the pass program trends a little bit more. It seems like there were some definitional changes in the press release. You’re now citing pass member sales plus pass sales plus member sales. Specifically, that two and a half percent increase you are seeing right now in pass program plus members—how has that paced through October?

I guess what I’m really trying to get to is how much of the Georgia incident might have impacted your pass sales in October and kind of trying to get to read-throughs for 2027 impact from this sort of foregone pass sales, if you want to call it that way.

John

Hi Arpine, this is John. I’ll take that. So in our pass program—in our pass base—it’s a pass and membership base, and it’s an active base at any moment in time during the year, and it fluctuates based on people moving in and out of membership or potentially certain passes expiring. So we added membership to about eight parks that had never had membership at the beginning of the summer, and now we have a higher membership base. So that is one impact.

The second thing that we did is we intentionally launched the 2027 pass program later than we did last year, and that was to avoid what we call skip-level behavior where people are getting a year and a half of a pass on a one-season purchase. So the combination of membership and an intentional delay in the launch in the summer by a couple of weeks has lowered the base of 2027 sales as we go in. We expect that to be even maybe slightly up as we get to the new year in terms of the pass and membership base.

So that’s the dynamic there. And there’s an intentional skip-level delay so that we can yield more out of those passes going forward. As far as Georgia and trying to model any impacts from there—well, first, our main focus here is on the investigation and on safety, of course. But what I would say, if you want to talk about the business performance with Georgia, is that if you go back to what we commented on in the script, these are resilient brands, strong brands, and all of our research says both the Six Flags brands and the park brands are strong. We’ve gone back and studied incidents in the industry, and, you know, it’s very difficult to make a prediction.

But as far as the performance in Georgia, these things are typically not a matter of years and more a matter of months if, as we do all the right things. So I don’t have anything to quantify that for you. What I can say is any impact from that seems to be limited to Georgia and potentially Magic Mountain because we have the X2 matter as well, and then some isolated impacts on the parks that have temporary closures due to their rides out of commission for a period of time right now.

But we don’t see anything beyond that, and as we move forward we’ll share with you.

Arpine Kocharian (Analyst at UBS)

That’s very, very helpful. Thank you for that. And then just a quick follow-up, you know, and thank you for clarifying the liquidity situation in your release. I think that’s very helpful. But I was wondering if you could talk or maybe walk us through a bit more on both Georgia payment as well as—and this is going to be a lot more forward-looking than you’re probably ready to look right now—but 2028, 2029 maturities given sort of higher cost of capital today.

But mostly I’m interested in how you’re thinking about the balance sheet more medium term beyond just the next quarter. But of course, as we think about next quarter and the Georgia payment, that’s probably the more relevant question near term.

Ash

Yeah. So thank you. This is Ash and I’ll take that question. So we’ve internally modeled our liquidity scenario. Knowing the variables that we know today and assuming that we will have to fund Georgia fully, based on that analysis and based on knowing what the Q1 2026 burn was, we believe we have sufficient liquidity available to us to continue to invest in the business and operate the business. That analysis that I talked about, scenario analysis that we prepared, does not include any benefits from what John talked about on portfolio optimization. So that will be incremental. We also have, if needed, the lever of looking at growth capex and, you know, making a refinement on the timing. So we have some flexibility there if needed again.

And then obviously the fact is that we are in active discussion with the partners and we’ll share in terms of what the outcome is and how many partners might want to stay and roll over because that will help reducing our cash flow. That is not included in the analysis. The analysis includes that everything is fully funded and we have sufficient liquidity to run the business both from investment perspective and operations.

OPERATOR

Your next question comes from the line of James Hardiman with Citi. James, your line is open.

James Hardiman (Analyst at Citi)

Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. So obviously way too early to have guidance with respect to 2027. I don’t know if you will ever give guidance on 2027, but I’m sort of going fishing here a little bit. But maybe anything that you feel like you have visibility on as we look to 2027, whether it’s attendance or admissions, pricing, in-park pricing, labor costs, you know, weather is always going to be a big swing factor. I don’t know if you feel like on balance 2026 was a bad weather year.

That creates an easier comparison. Obviously you’ve had some success cutting costs. Sort of how we should think about incremental run-rate savings into 2027. Again, I’m sort of fishing here, but anything you can give us to help us think through 2027 would be great.

Ash

So this is Ash. I can start off with the cost piece first. And, you know, in terms of the business principle that we’ve been using from a cost perspective is that cost savings should be such that they offset inflationary pressures and then deliver some to the bottom line. You know, a lot of work has gone within the organization to be able to trace, track, and report cost savings and also trace, track, and report on the inflationary pressures and the investments we want to make into the business such that the cost savings deliver and flow down after offsetting inflation to the bottom line.

And that will be the going-in approach while we do this. It’s not a one-time effort, it’s ongoing. Every cost that comes on the table, we turn it and we try to look for opportunities in terms of how we can improve those costs. We have a view in terms of what the future pipeline would look like and we are working on that pipeline for 2027 and beyond.

John

I’ll just maybe add, James, in terms of the weather, I mean, we don’t view it as a positive weather year. We mentioned the wildfire impacts, other things we had during the summer. But we also don’t want to dwell on that because we believe we have enough opportunities with the strategies and priorities we’ve laid out to move the needle significantly on our own. And so the one thing I might add to Ash, and to add a little bit to our first discussion around the shift in pass and membership and per caps, we have identified some great opportunities for next year, too, in terms of Fast Lane. It’s a big business for us and we have some pricing opportunities there. We’ve taken pricing opportunities and reconstituted our dining plans, which are a significant business for us, going into next year. So I won’t go into all the details, but we are working on opportunities to grow the business and, you know, weather for us is an uncontrollable.

So we’ll control the controllables.

James Hardiman (Analyst at Citi)

Got it. That’s helpful. And then maybe as a follow-up to Steve’s question up top about portfolio optimization, I guess if we go back to last year’s sale, or I guess this year’s sale, sorry, the EPR sale, you know, obviously you were able to generate cash but you lost a certain amount of EBITDA generation and so the net impact on leverage was pretty minimal. But I think if I’m hearing what you’re saying correctly, maybe you think that deleverage can be meaningful as a result of continued portfolio optimization from here, you know, again, similar to how Steve laid it out.

I don’t know if I’m reading too much into what you’ve said so far, or is there an opportunity to sort of assist the balance sheet and the leverage as a result of continued optimization? Thanks.

John

So we look at this two ways, James. If you look at the project, the several parks that we sold earlier this year, yes, they did help us with the cash and the leverage ratio, although it didn’t necessarily lower our leverage ratio. We sold some smaller parks that weren’t a major focus for us at a multiple that was similar to where the portfolio was trading. So that gives us strategic focus from the management team, resources, capital allocation to redirect to the bigger parks.

That’s an important step for us and we’re open to similar sales like that going forward. But secondly, because in some smaller parks in the portfolio we were able to get approximately a similar multiple, if you look at all the parks in our portfolio, they wouldn’t all sell at the same multiple. So there’s an opportunity to do more potentially on the leverage ratio. But again, this is something we’re exploring. We don’t have anything to announce today.

Ash

And if I may just add to what John just said, you know, portfolio optimization is one lever. The other thing we have to also keep in mind is that we are going to focus on continuing to grow our attendance in the business and hold the middle of the P&L between cost savings and inflationary pressures that we see so that the EBITDA also improves. That will also help drive an improvement in leverage. So it’s multiple levers that we have that we’ll have to deploy simultaneously.

James Hardiman (Analyst at Citi)

Got it. Thank you both.

OPERATOR

Your next question comes from the line of Brandt Montour with Barclays. Brandt, your line is open.

Brandt Montour (Analyst at Barclays)

Can you hear me? Okay, great. So the first question is circling back on the commentary on October. I was hoping you could be a little bit more specific. When you said that you saw visitation growth in the last week of October, ex directly impacted parks, when you say directly impacted parks, are those Georgia and Magic Mountain? Are those all parks with rides that were proactively shut down? Are those sort of all Six Flags branded parks? Just sort of give us a sense of what proportion of the portfolio was able to grow toward the end of October?

John

Yeah, I think without going into all the individual parks, we saw some softness in Georgia. And if you look at the incident and the ride-related closures, that was about half of it. And as I mentioned, that’s primarily Georgia and Magic Mountain. And then there are some parks that, because of the incident, had one or two very signature rides closed. And that had some impact, some temporary impact. That was not all the parks with ride closure. So if you look at that, that’s around half. And then we have the named storm that we mentioned and the other factors there. So towards the end of the month, we did see improvement. We saw improvement in different regions. There’s not a pattern to the improvement that we saw in terms of performance with parks that are branded Six Flags or not. So beyond what we’ve already discussed, we don’t see an impact on the other Six Flags branded parks.

Brandt Montour (Analyst at Barclays)

Okay, that’s helpful. And then just circling back on the last discussion, can you guys just give us an update on the Maryland and Richmond asset sale specifically?

John

Yes, the Maryland asset sale is still targeted for late 2027. The buyer is going through an entitlement process to move toward finalization of the sale. So that hasn’t changed. And then in terms of Richmond, we have moved forward in a process and are in a process to evaluate bids. We don’t have anything more to say beyond that.

Brandt Montour (Analyst at Barclays)

Great. Thanks.

OPERATOR

Your next question comes from the line of Patrick Scholes with Truist Securities. Patrick, your line is open.

Patrick Scholes (Analyst at Truist Securities)

Hi. Good morning everyone. When I look at the slide on passes and memberships with the active pass base up 7.1% as of September 27, but then expected to be flat to slightly up, that would imply obviously a sizable deceleration happened, probably for obvious reasons, in October. What was your season pass sales pace in October that would lead to that lower expectation? Thank you.

John

Yeah. I would go back to some of the intentional decisions we made in terms of skip-level behavior and a later launch. That is a big impact in July in terms of the number sold, because for two weeks we weren’t selling the next year’s pass. The other impact is that we have more people in membership and those are rolling over the calendar period. We’re not going to comment on October. What I would say for October is we mentioned the month was softer.

The pass base was, in terms of the pass sales pace, it was slower as well. And we do have a number of measures quarter-to-go that we believe are going to give us an opportunity for improvement there.

Patrick Scholes (Analyst at Truist Securities)

Okay, we’ll leave it at that. Thank you.

OPERATOR

Your next question comes from the line of Chris Waronka with Deutsche Bank. Chris, your line is open.

Chris Waronka (Analyst at Deutsche Bank)

Hey, good morning guys. Thanks for taking the questions and all the details so far. John, I think the reduction in capex is certainly discretionary. Capex is certainly positive. But the question on that is, do the parks look different next year in terms of some of that kind of hard-dollar capex maybe going over to opex in terms of—you referenced experiences—is that going to potentially include things like more live entertainment and other things that maybe make the parks look different each week?

John

We are looking at an expanded events and entertainment, and that will be part of the slate going forward. We have a number of focus parks as part of how we optimize the portfolio and how we optimize the capital allocation and the expense allocation. Magic Mountain, for example, is going to be undergoing a major refurbishment. That’s all contemplated in the numbers that Ash shared with you and that’s contemplated within our savings plan. Additionally, in New Jersey, Six Flags Great Adventure, and Six Flags Great America in Chicago, we have similar programs underway, making the parks more family friendly, providing more comfort, shade, amenities.

But that’s all contemplated within the plan. There may be some expansion in entertainment operating expenses. We did that this year and we’ll do it as it makes sense.

Chris Waronka (Analyst at Deutsche Bank)

Okay, thanks. Thanks, John. Very, very helpful. And then I guess just as a follow up, I don’t know if you guys gave out any data points on this or how you look at it, but do you think you still have room on peak attendance days or weekends? And do you see the opportunity going forward when you talk about rebuilding attendance? Do you think that comes more in kind of the, you know, some of the shoulder days, I guess you might call them, or do you think that there’s still a lot of room on some of these peak weekends and holidays?

And I guess I would kind of strip out weather and just kind of look at it on a clean weather basis, if that’s possible.

OPERATOR

We have reached the end of our Q and A session. I will now turn the call back to John for closing remarks.

John

Thank you. We appreciate you joining us this morning. We’re energized by the opportunity ahead and grateful to our team members across all of the parks. We look forward to speaking with you again next quarter. Thank you.

OPERATOR

This concludes today’s call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

Disclaimer: This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. While we strive for accuracy, there may be errors or omissions in this automated transcription. For official company statements and financial information, please refer to the company’s SEC filings and official press releases. Corporate participants’ and analysts’ statements reflect their views as of the date of this call and are subject to change without notice.