AMC Entertainment Holdings CEO Adam Aron said during an earnings call on Monday that the movie theatre chain plans to start accepting bitcoin as payment by the end of 2021.
“Many of our new shareholders are also quite enthusiastic about cryptocurrency,” he said on the call. “By year end, we will have the information and technology systems in place to accept bitcoin as payment for movie tickets and concessions if purchased online at all of our U.S. theaters.”
“We are also in the preliminary stage of now exploring how else AMC can participate in this new burgeoning cryptocurrency universe and we’re quite intrigued by potentially lucrative business opportunities for AMC if we intelligently pursue further serious involvement with cryptocurrency,” he said, adding that more details would be shared in the future once plans materialize.
The company also announced its second quarter 2021 results, calling the time “transformational” for the business facing challenges during the pandemic. The company raised another $1.25 billion USD of new equity capital in the quarter, boosting its quarter liquidity to over $2 billion USD.
As of June 30, 2021, AMC operated 593 domestic theaters and 335 international theaters. The majority of global operations were suspended for the first two months of the second quarter and did not reopen until early June, the report said.
“Thanks to increased vaccination counts in the countries we serve, we started to see rising movie going demand, and we safely welcomed more than 22 million guests back to our theaters across the globe during the course of the second quarter,” the company added.
According to CNBC, AMC shares climbed over 4 percent in extended trading on Monday following the news. The company has been deemed a meme stock made popular by Reddit‘s r/wallstreetbets, though its share price has experienced wild fluctuations in recent months.
