Product1 publisher3 min readPublished
AMC reads a 37 percent attendance gap as a shortage of movies
Ticket revenue set a summer record while admissions ran 276 million behind 2019 over the same 30 weeks. AMC's answer is a distribution arm called Leawood Films, whose first releases are unlikely before 2027.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- AMC said on August 3 that it had just posted the highest-revenue weekend in its 106-year history.
- More than 10.2 million people went to AMC and Odeon theaters that weekend, with Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey leading the box office.
- Twenty-eight days after the record weekend, AMC said it needed more movies and launched Leawood Films, a distributor aimed at small and midsized features.
- The first Leawood releases are unlikely to reach screens before 2027 or 2028, according to Fast Company.
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Why it matters
- constraint The remedy AMC chose cannot fill a single week of the next two calendars, so every thin October between now and 2027 gets scheduled under the current arrangement.
- exposure Seven distributors supplied about 83 percent of AMC's US admissions revenue in 2025, which means the weeks AMC cannot fill are set by companies its own filing says it does not control.
- contradiction AMC's diagnosis is excess capacity, but the wide-release count is at roughly 96 percent of 2019 while attendance sits at 63 percent, so the empty seats are harder to blame on empty dates.
- decision Anyone underwriting exhibition now has to price the price line and the count line separately, because the record was set on what people paid, not on how many showed up.
More than 10.2 million people bought a ticket at AMC or its Odeon subsidiary over the first weekend of August, and part of what made that weekend a revenue record is what each of them paid [2]. Fast Company reports that tickets cost more now, especially for IMAX and other premium screenings, and that the money has come back faster than the crowds [5]. The count is where the gap sits: 470.9 million tickets through the first 30 weeks of this year, against 747.3 million in the same weeks of 2019 [4]. That is 63 percent of the 2019 figure, or 276.4 million fewer admissions [1][2].
AMC's read of the problem is supply. "Leawood Films is being created with a straightforward objective, given that substantial excess capacity exists in the movie theatre industry: to bring more movies to theatres," Adam Aron, AMC's CEO, said in the press release [7]. The announcement landed on August 31, 28 days after the record [6][5].
The release count does not carry the strongest version of that diagnosis. Cinema United, the theater trade group, projects 115 films will open in at least 2,000 North American locations this year, against 120 in 2019, about 96 percent of the 2019 supply [13][3]. Attendance is at 63 percent [1]. What has actually moved is the spread across the calendar: 34 wide releases this summer against 44 in 2019, ten fewer over the same weeks [14][4].
That is the part an operator feels, because staff, concessions and utilities do not pause between tentpoles. "This isn't a business that can sustain itself off blockbusters alone," Daniel Loria, senior vice president of content strategy at the Boxoffice Company, told Fast Company [9]. He called reliance on them "a very high-risk proposition" [10], and pointed to Joker: Folie a Deux in 2024, when distributors had largely avoided the date assuming a hit and left October thin after it bombed [11]. "Forget a bad weekend," Loria said. "You're talking about a bad month. You might be talking about six weeks if something doesn't connect" [12].
The hole is older than the pandemic. The Fithian Group found the number of films grossing between $50 million and $100 million fell 40 percent between 2004 and 2019 [16]. Fox released 12 to 17 movies a year before Disney bought it in 2019; soon after, Disney said it expected the core Fox studio to put out five or six [17].
So who is Leawood for. Loria names adult dramas, romantic comedies and R-rated comedies as the gap in the marketplace [15], and that is the thin end of AMC's own supply: seven distributors accounted for roughly 83 percent of its US admissions revenue in 2025 [19], leaving about 17 percent for everyone else [6]. AMC states the dependency in its annual filing: "We rely on distributors of motion pictures, over whom we have no control, for the films that we exhibit" [18].
Two lines are worth keeping apart in any recovery number, the price per ticket and the number of tickets. The two figures here do not even cover the same window: the $4.76 billion record is the summer, the ticket counts are the first 30 weeks of the year [3][4][7]. Price is at a record and count is 37 percent short of 2019 [3][1]. More titles move the count only if the people who stopped going stopped for want of something to watch, and Leawood's first release is unlikely before 2027 or 2028 [8].
What to watch
- Whether Leawood names acquisitions or production commitments with dates inside 2027, which would test the 2027-2028 estimate.
- Full-year admissions against 2019 once the fourth quarter closes, and whether the 37 percent gap narrows.
- Whether next summer's wide-release count moves back toward 44 or stays near this year's 34.