RE: AMC7 Aug 2022 11:06
Yes, they have lots of revenue but they also have lots of costs and although the revenue has increased significantly this year it hasn't quite reached the level to be enough to offset all the costs even in Q2 (for AMC at least)
For example in Q2 AMC has revenues from ticket sales of $1.16bn but their cost of running the business was $1.18bn so a slight loss and that's before things like interest and overall they made a loss of $121m.
So although they make margin of showing the films (after they've paid the studios) and really high margins on concessions they still have a lot of additional, largely fixed costs (staff, rent, power etc.). They need to reach a certain threshold in those margins in order to offset these 'fixed' costs and as revenue is still a long way from 2019 levels it still isn't quite enough (though for Q2 I thought it might just be, but clearly not as far as AMC is concerned - maybe it will be different for CINE)?
There is not a lot of breakdown of the costs but for info they broadly breakdown for AMC as:
Film exhibition costs - £328m (about half of the ticket revenue)
Food costs - $64m (about a sixth of the concession revenue)
Staff, power etc - $470m
Rent/Depreciation - $320m
Loan Interest - $80m
Other - $30m
Because of all these costs that soak up things like the very high margins on concessions the business is not quite the money-printing machine that some people think. Even in 2019 CINE only made around $200m profit from over $4bn revenue.