AMC Theatres launches a $25 million-plus marketing campaign with Nicole Kidman as star presenter this week to encourage a return to moviegoing amid the pandemic. The key copyline is “AMC Theatres. We Make Movies Better” in what is an advocacy and brand-building exercise.
The campaign is a surprise because cinemas don’t normally bankroll pricey advertising, instead relying on film distributors to fund marketing. “It is the first such multimedia campaign in AMC’s 101-year history and believed to be the first of its kind ever in the history of U.S. cinema,” says a press release from the Leawood, Kansas-based exhibition giant.
“The core component of the campaign are multiple 60-second, 30-second and 15-second filmed commercials all of which star Oscar winner and 4-time Academy Award nominee Nicole Kidman,” the AMC release continues. “The campaign also will be used in nine countries in Europe by AMC’s Odeon Cinema Group.” The campaign has started online and hits national TV on Sept. 12.
In the centerpiece TV commercial, Kidman extols the in-theater experience as she enters a dark AMC theater. ““We come to this place for magic,” Kidman says. “Not just entertainment, but somehow reborn. Together. Dazzling images on a huge silver screen [with] sound that I can feel.”
Commenting on the campaign, AMC chairman and CEO Adam Aron said, “As we have said repeatedly of late, thanks to the billions of dollars we have raised this year, AMC is strong, and it is time for AMC to play on offense again.” In a separate but similar vein, trade group the National Assn. of Theatre Owners (NATO) rolled out its own industry campaign targeting consumers built on the theme “The Big Screen Is Back” in which Matthew McConaughey is presenter; the NATO initiative is smaller with no pricey national TV commercials.
AMC is the largest U.S. circuit at nearly 600 theaters with 8,043 screens, as well as major United Kingdom chain Odeon Cinema. In both the U.S. and Europe, AMC owns 950 theatres and 10,500 screens. The publicly traded stock of the exhibitor is a favorite of small investors, who call themselves “apes.” They drove up AMC stock from a low of $2-5 a share in 2020 to over $55 in recent months, which baffled investing professionals who value the stock at a few dollars a share. On Sept. 8, AMC shares closed at $47.40, down from its recent high but still far ahead of its price-range in 2020. These small investors are fond of peppering their online posts about stock picks with memes — familiar images and videos captioned with an alternative messages, which are often humorous.
Riding the wave of apes-buying, AMC raised $1.2 billion in fresh capital selling new shares earlier this year, but still shoulders over $4 billion in debt, which is crushing.
“It’s been a particularly wild ride for the world’s largest exhibition chain, which found itself written off for dead before being improbably embraced on Reddit and social media to become a meme-stock,” says a Variety story by Rebecca Rubin. “AMC has been seeing improvements in ticket sales, but the company’s long-term health remains far from stable. Still, Aron dismisses any obituaries for the movie theater business and maintains that reports of its death have been exaggerated.
The cinema industry’s comeback trail is patchy. Paramount Pictures postponed two major releases scheduled this year: “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Mission: Impossible 7” because of concerns the Delta virus variant would inhibit moviegoing. On the other hand, Walt Disney Studios’ comic book adaptation “Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” premiered Sept. 3-5 to a domestic market record high of $75.4 million in boxoffice for that holiday weekend.
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