AMC CEO Adam Aron Defends New “Sightline” Ticket Pricing, Acknowledges “Substantial Change To The Status Quo For U.S. Moviegoers”
deadline.comAMC Entertainment CEO Adam Aron said the new Sightline ticket pricing regime the chain’s trying out in three markets has the potential to expand the moviegoing market and prevent future price hikes. “We are in inflationary times, and inflationary times cause costs to rise,” he said. “Under the pre-Sightline structure of the industry, if we wanted to raise the price in a theater, the only choice we had was to raise the price on all the seats.” With Sightline, “if we felt the need to raise prices, we might only do it in the most popular seats in an auditorium and actually hold the line and not raise prices on other seats.
So, it is a way of increasing the price now, but preventing a price increase later on.” “I am looking at ‘heat maps’ [meaning] what seats are booked for a particular movie, and nobody sits in row one.
It could be opening night for Star Wars, rows three to 18 are booked solid, row one is empty. There is a possibility here that by discounting the price up-front, we may be able to expand the moviegoing market to more price-sensitive consumers,” he said during a call following AMC’s fourth-quarter financial report.
The company announced earlier this month — to an enormous among of flak — that seats in its auditorium would be classified as Value Sightline (lower price), Standard Sightline (traditional price) and Preferred Sightline (higher price).
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