AMC Entertainment Holdings, which runs the largest movie theatre chain in the U.S., will begin accepting bitcoin payments for tickets and concessions by the end of the year, the company’s CEO Adam Aron said in a Q2 earnings call Monday.
“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,” Aron said.
AMC did not specify what technology it would use to process the payments. The company has 593 theaters in the U.S. and 335 international locations.
Aron said that AMC will also begin accepting Apple Pay and Google Pay payments by the end of 2021.
AMC stock was trading at roughly $33 Monday morning. After the announcement, the stock jumped 13.2% in value before falling to approximately $35 per share at the time of publication.
During the Reddit-driven retail trading frenzy earlier this year, so-called “meme stocks” like GameStop and AMC soared in value. AMC’s pivot to bitcoin payments suggests the struggling movie theatre chain is seeing the value in cryptocurrencies.
