AMC Theatres Plans to Improve Its A-List Program, Raises Prices for “Discount Tuesday”

Last summer, AMC Theatres introduced its AMC Stubs A-List subscription service for movie tickets. On a recent corporate earnings call, the company’s CEO laid out a plan to improve that service for its users, specifically highlighting how they’ll be opening it up to users too young to obtain a driver’s license.

But it’s not all good news. The theater chain is also raising the prices of screenings that fall on its “discount Tuesday” from $5 up to $7 in some markets. Read about the new changes at AMC below.

AMC Wants to Take Your Picture

On an earnings call late last week, AMC’s CEO Adam Aron explained that the company currently has 787,342 members, which he called “light-years ahead of” their early projections. He says they’ve gained 180,000 members since the beginning of this year, despite the fact that the company raised prices for A-List in 15 states in 2019. Impressive.

As far as improvements go, A-List will soon be utilizing a photo system to identify its members at its theaters. Currently, the program requires that members be 16 years old or older because they need to show a government issued ID to prove they are who they say they are. Rival services like MoviePass and the now-shuttered Sinemia experienced problems with user fraud, so AMC has been working to find a way to counteract that. Aron thinks he’s found a solution (quotes via Rerelease News):

I’m also pleased to say that we are working right now to program family membership capability within our website and app. And essentially what we’re going to do is program a photo upload capability, so that you can store your picture with us so you won’t have to show us the government ID for us to know that you are actually the member because we’ll have your picture loaded on file and while you will be able to change your picture from time to time, it will be infrequently. So maybe once a year or something, so that we don’t open ourselves up to fraud.

When we have the photo upload capability, that will then allow us to lower the minimum age down to let family members enroll not only for a husband and wife but also for their children…and that’s yet another one of these bells and whistle adds to A-List coming down the pipe that will make A-List even more attractive to more people, which I think will cause it to continue to grow as a program into the future. But I wouldn’t be surprised if that photo upload capability is a 2020 initiative rather than something that will happen this year in 2019.

Discount Tuesdays: Still a Deal, Just Not Quite as Good

Frequent AMC visitors might be familiar with the company’s $5 Tuesdays, which launched last year as a recurring deal in which the company provided 2D tickets for five dollars and discounted premium prices in theaters on that day nationwide. Aron says that gambit worked, making Tuesdays the second-biggest attendance day at AMC theaters, but he now seems to realize there’s even more money to be made while still cutting audiences a break from the full prices:

Actually, when we launched the program last year, we called it $5 Tuesdays. We renamed it Discount Tuesdays at the beginning of 2019 because very quietly we’ve been taking price increases on Tuesday pushing Tuesday from $5 to anywhere between $5 and $7 depending upon the theater.

AMC’s website says that Discount Tuesday tickets are currently $6 in California, Connecticut, Washington DC, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Virginia, and  “tickets are $5 or a lower prevailing ticket price in remaining states.” I don’t go to AMC theaters very often (a different chain is closer to my apartment), so this is the first I’m hearing about this Tuesday deal at all. And while it’s obviously not as good a deal as it used to be with this slight price hike, $7 for a movie ticket – especially one in the evening – still sounds like a pretty damn good deal.

Special thanks to AMC Stubs member Ethan Anderton, who confirmed these numbers before publication.

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