AMC’s A-List members now make up 20% of U.S. attendance. Its $4 billion debt is the harder test

Fletcher Williams saw six movies at AMC theaters last month. At full price, that would have run about $150. He paid $29.99.

The open question is whether that loyalty can do what a run of hit movies has not yet done: make AMC consistently profitable while it carries roughly $4 billion in debt.

The rebound is real. AMC reported $1.60 billion in revenue for the second quarter of 2026, up 14.2% from a year earlier and the highest quarterly total in its 106-year history . Worldwide attendance rose 13.5% to 71.3 million.

Admissions brought in $863.1 million, up 13.2%. Food and beverage sales rose 15.3% to $576.1 million. The industry helped: the $2.99 billion domestic box office was the strongest second quarter in seven years, with six films opening above $75 million.

The hole was deep. AMC’s revenue fell 77% in 2020 , from $5.47 billion to $1.24 billion, as the pandemic shut theaters. As recently as early 2025, chairman and CEO Adam Aron said the industry’s January-to-March domestic box office was its weakest since 1996 , setting aside quarters hit by COVID.

Records have not yet meant profits. AMC posted an $11.4 million net loss in the second quarter as interest and other charges absorbed much of the gain. For 2025, it lost $632 million on $4.85 billion in revenue, according to Fortune ’s company data .

For frequent moviegoers, the arithmetic is simple. A standard adult ticket at AMC typically runs $13 to $15 before premium formats like IMAX or 3D [source needed], so a movie a week can top $65 a month in tickets alone.

Williams first signed up in college, when he lived 15 minutes from an AMC. For the number of films he sees, he said, “The membership basically pays for itself.”

“$25 to $30 is roughly the equivalent of a single ticket for a new movie where I live. Paying that once a month for the ability to see up to 4 movies a week is incredibly worth it,” said Williams, who now lives in Los Angeles.

Members could see as many as 17 films a month, but the typical member sees two or three, according to AMC . Even at that pace, most come out roughly even or ahead.

AMC launched A-List in 2018 , when Fortune tracked it as AMC’s answer to MoviePass . Membership has more than doubled over the past five years, and A-List members now account for about 20% of AMC’s U.S. attendance , Aron told analysts in July.

“We’ve seen significant membership growth in recent years, as movies have returned in much greater numbers to theatres, and at the end of the second quarter of 2026, A-List had grown to more than 1.1 million members,” AMC spokesperson Ryan Noonan wrote in an email. “A-Listers remain among our most engaged moviegoers, regularly seeing a broad range of films at AMC. We think the continued growth of A-List speaks volumes about how much our members enjoy the program and the value they see in it.”