Movie-goers will soon have the chance to eat their favorite theater snack at home, as AMC is preparing to launch its own microwavable popcorn brand. The initial launch will have three flavors: lightly salted, movie theater butter, and extra butter. The popcorn will be on Walmart endcaps starting March 11 and on Walmart shelves at 2,600 locations and on Walmart’s website next month.
“Real movie theatre popcorn popped and ready to enjoy for any party, tailgate, or snack occasion,” AMC Theatres’ website claims. “Follow our Heat & Eat instructions for that authentic deliciously warm movie popcorn experience!” It should be noted that the extra butter version also comes with a pourable butter topping, allowing people to add more butter flavor to the popcorn.
AMC CEO Adam Aron wants people to know he’s really excited about the launch. In fact, he went on about it and focused a large chunk of time during the theater chain’s earnings call Tuesday to hype it up.
“Yes, the enthusiasm and excitement for AMC Perfectly Popcorn at home is real. I see it on Twitter,” Aron said (via IndieWire). “When I look at the readership of the tweets I’ve been putting out recently on popcorn, they’re sky high. The likes are sky high, the retweets are sky high, the comments back to me, every single one of which I read by the way, I got like 45,000 inbound messages on the popcorn tweets recently and I read them all. Boy, they make me excited, because you’re excited about it.”
Apparently, it wasn’t just the one time that Aron took time to plug in the popcorn. The call was limited to just one live question from an analyst, but Aron went all in again explaining the would-be importance of the home release of its popcorn.
“Not to interrupt, but you know what you’re going to like more than how we report the popcorn results? Eating the popcorn. It’s really good,” he said. “We actually worked for a full year on the flavor profile of these products. It’s really great.”
Sure, it could be a good way for AMC to generate additional money, especially at a time like this. However, Aron has already called this a potentially “multi-billion dollar” market. Here’s the thing though: Movie theater popcorn is already at an estimated 1,275% markup. Theater chains know that viewers will usually pay more for concessions, so they hike up the prices. Way up. But taking into consideration the number of families avoiding movies altogether in favor of streaming or even home release, having a brand like AMC in their home might not be the worst idea.
However, AMC Entertainment lost another $287.7 million this past quarter, bringing its net losses for the year to $973 million. Thirdly, it still has nearly $5 billion worth of debt. Analyst forecasts for AMC remain downright depressing with the stock closing at $7.14 on Tuesday.
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