AMC Movie Ticket Subscribers Top 400K

AMC’s movie subscription service now has more than 400,000 subscribers as it takes on its already-suffering rival MoviePass.

AMC launched the service — called AMC Stubs A-List — in June. The program gives customers up to three movies per week, along with the other benefits of AMC Stub Premiere, for $19.95 a month. Members get access to any available showtime at any AMC location regardless of the format, and it can be used on the fly or by making reservations days or weeks in advance.

It’s interesting that customers are flocking to AMC’s offering, despite the fact that it charges almost double the rate of MoviePass. AMC’s program gained 260,000 subscribers in its first seven weeks, the first 175,000 of which were netted in the first five weeks of the offering. AMC said the service has accounted for about 1 million admissions, or roughly 4 percent of attendance at U.S. theaters.

“This is very good for AMC and very good for our movie studio partners as well,” AMC CEO Adam Aron said at the time. “While one would think that the rate of sign-ups will inevitably have to slow down at some point, enrollments now are continuing at quite a brisk pace, getting AMC to scale much sooner than we initially anticipated.”

For its part, Helios & Matheson, which owns MoviePass, has seen its shares lose almost 100 percent of their value this year over concerns about MoviePass’s viability. In May the company disclosed that it has been losing an average of $21.7 million in cash on a monthly basis between September and April. And in August, HMNY lost Carl Schramm, a member of its board of directors, after he resigned due to concerns about corporate management.

“I have objected to the manner in which a number of business decisions have been presented to the Board of Directors by management, without sufficient time for the Board to examine complex documents, to review significant transactions, or to discuss how the proposed actions fit into the Company’s strategic plan,” Schramm said in a letter.