AMC ENTERTAINMENT HOLDINGS, INC. (AMC): what the price assumes
In the published model solve dated 2026-Q2, anchored at $2.64, AMC ENTERTAINMENT HOLDINGS, INC. (AMC) is priced for today's economics sustained for ~8.8 years. boothcheck publishes no house fair value, target price, or buy/sell rating; individual model outputs and user-controlled scenarios are analytical inputs, not Boothcheck targets. Narrative composed 2026-07-25.
Generated: 2026-07-29 · Exported: 2026-08-01 · Source: https://boothcheck.com/report/AMC
Headline
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Ticker | AMC |
| Company | AMC ENTERTAINMENT HOLDINGS, INC. |
| Sector / Industry | Communication Services |
| Current price | $2.64/sh |
What The Price Assumes (Inversion)
The assumption today's price embeds, recovered by inverting the valuation.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Inversion basis | whole-company |
| Must persist for | 8.8y |
| Multiple paid | 91x operating income |
Solve inputs: computed at a 7% cost of capital; growth searched up to the 25% self-funding ceiling; each 1pp moves the implied horizon ~2.7 years (computed at the 7% minimum rate; the CAPM rate 6.1% sits below it).
Reconcile: at the x-ray's 9.3% required return this reads ~14.3 years; the models below use their own rates.
How unusual the bet is: elevated
| Reference | Value |
|---|---|
| vs own history | +0.46σ |
| sustained it ~8.8 years at this level | 17% |
| implied end-window share | 0% |
Valuation X-Ray
The price is justified by relative-multiple and growth-DCF.
How the valuation models price the stock relative to the market price. Price/FV above 1.0 means the market pays more than that lens defends (expensive); at or below 1.0 the lens can defend the price.
| Family | Median price/FV | Models | Reads |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asset | — | 0 | — |
| Earnings | — | 0 | — |
| Relative | 0.16x | 2 | justifies |
| Growth | 0.61x | 2 | justifies |
Families that justify the price: Relative, Growth
The models below discount at their own flat-beta convention rates (cost of equity 9.3%, WACC 2.7%); the inversion above states its own rate.
Per-Model Detail (n=4)
| Model | Family | FV | Price/FV | Applicable | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DCF Perpetual Growth | Growth | — | — | no | Reference only (OCF-based, capex excluded): OCF $0.1B |
| DCF Exit Multiple | Growth | $0.00 | — | no | Negative/zero FCF or EBITDA — equity value floored at $0 |
| Relative Valuation | Relative | $16.44 | 0.16x | yes | P/S fallback (negative EPS): Sector P/S 2.0x × TTM revenue — excluded from consensus |
| Simple DDM | Growth | — | — | no | — |
| Two-Stage DDM | Growth | — | — | no | — |
| Simple Excess Return | Asset | — | — | no | — |
| Two-Stage Excess Return | Asset | — | — | no | — |
| Discounted Future Market Cap | Growth | $2.49 | 1.06x | yes | Rev $5.0B, growth 13% (input: historical growth; tapered), Terminal P/S: 0.3x / 0.3x / 0.4x (bear / base = today's held flat / bull, cap 12x) |
| Peter Lynch Fair Value | Relative | $0.00 | — | no | Negative/zero EPS — earnings-based value floored at $0 |
| Margin Trajectory | Growth | $16.70 | 0.16x | yes | Margin ramp: -11% → 12% over 7yr, rev growth 13% (input: historical growth; tapered) |
| Earnings Power Value | Earnings | — | — | no | — |
| Residual Income | Asset | — | — | no | — |
| Graham Number | Asset | — | — | no | — |
| EV/EBITDA Relative | Relative | $0.01 | 264.00x | yes | EBITDA $0.40B × sector EV/EBITDA 9.0x (excluded from median) |
| FCF Yield | Earnings | — | — | no | — |
| SBC-Adj FCF Yield | Earnings | — | — | no | — |
| Ben Graham Formula | Earnings | — | — | no | — |
| ROIC-Justified P/B | Asset | — | — | no | — |
| P/Sales Sector | Relative | $16.44 | 0.16x | yes | Revenue $5.03B × sector P/S 2.0x |
| PEG Fair Value | Relative | — | — | no | — |
| Earnings Yield | Earnings | — | — | no | — |
| Funds From Operations Multiple | Relative | — | — | no | — |
| Clinical Phase NPV | Growth | — | — | no | — |
| Merton | Asset | — | — | no | — |
| V5 Mechanical | — | — | — | no | — |
Solvency
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Net debt | $3.7b |
| Net debt / NOPAT (after-tax) | 57.10x |
| Net debt / operating income (pre-tax) | 45.11x |
| Interest coverage | 0.2x |
| Share count CAGR (dilution) | 51.2% |
| Burning cash | no |
Bullet Takeaways
- AMC is one of the three largest theatrical exhibitors in the United States and Canada, and its 2025 growth came from price rather than people: the average ticket rose 4.6% while attendance slipped from 156.9 million patrons to 155.8 million.
- The share count has compounded at roughly 51% a year over the four years to March 2026, and in December 2025 holders approved lifting the authorized share ceiling from 550,000,000 to 1,100,000,000, which is the capacity for a great deal more of the same.
- Through-the-cycle operating profit currently covers about a fifth of the interest bill, so the coming box office quarters matter less for reported earnings than for what they let the company refinance, and on what terms.
Bull Case
Exhibition is a scale business in a way that is easy to miss. Studios decide what gets made and when it opens. The exhibitor decides how many screens it goes on, in which formats, at what hour, and how much of the evening's spending happens in the lobby rather than at the ticket counter. AMC sits at the top of that hierarchy by size, and in 2025 it used the position: domestic revenue rose "primarily due to an increase in average ticket price of 4.6% and increase in our market share", even as attendance drifted from 156.9 million patrons to 155.8 million. Selling to slightly fewer people and collecting more from each of them is not a growth story. It is evidence of pricing power in a business where pricing power was supposed to have vanished.
The lobby is where the economics actually live. The 10-K is blunt about it: "Food and beverage sales are our second largest source of revenue after box office admissions." Studios take a share of the ticket. They take none of the popcorn, and none of the drink that goes with it. As of December 31, 2025 the company served alcohol in 386 of its U.S. theatres and 221 internationally, which is the cheapest available way to raise the spend per visit without raising the ticket. The same logic runs through the advertising arrangement: the amended exhibitor services agreement extends the relationship "by five years through February 13, 2042" and lifted advertising income by $15.6 million against the prior year. Long-dated contracted revenue on a fixed screen base is worth more to a borrower than to a company with no debt, because it is the part of the income statement that does not depend on what opens next Friday.
Scale also decides who benefits most from a good year. AMC turns over roughly $5.0 billion of revenue. Cinemark (CNK), the closest listed comparison, converts about $3.2 billion into a 5.3% net margin and grew 6.9% over the year. Because a theatre circuit's cost base is largely rent, staffing and screens rather than the films themselves, incremental admissions drop through at a high rate. AMC earns nothing on operating income today and about a 2% operating margin across a normal cycle. A mid-single-digit net margin is not an exotic outcome in this industry; it is what a comparable operator produces when attendance cooperates. The distance between those two states of the world is the whole bull case, and it is a distance measured in box office receipts rather than in strategy.
The quarter just reported shows what that looks like when the slate delivers. Revenue reached roughly $1.6 billion, up 14.2% on the year, and more than 71 million guests came through the doors worldwide. The domestic box office had its strongest quarter in seven years. Nothing structural changed. The films were simply there, and a fixed cost base absorbed them. For a company whose equity is a claim on what remains after the lenders are paid, a run of quarters like that is the mechanism by which the claim gets larger: stronger trailing cash flow buys better refinancing terms, and better terms leave more of the next good year with the shareholder.
Bear Case
Streaming did not empty the theatres. It changed who needs one. Every major studio now owns a distribution channel that competes with the exhibitor for the same film, and the 10-K names the field without flinching: the industry "faces competition from other forms of out-of-home entertainment, such as concerts, amusement parks and sporting events, and from other distribution channels for filmed entertainment, such as video streaming services, premium video on demand". The exhibitor's leverage in that negotiation is the exclusive window, and the window is set by counterparties whose own economics improve when it shortens. The filing flags the related risk that studios could "demand greater fees for the exhibition of their motion pictures, or further reduce the amount of future theatrical releases". That is the competitive problem in one line: the supplier can change both the price and the quantity of the product.
The trajectory underneath the recovery headlines is flat to down. The United States accounts for 88% of revenue and has compounded at about negative 2% a year across the last five clean years; the United Kingdom, a tenth of the business, at about negative 5%. Attendance in 2025 was lower than in 2024. What has been rising is the ticket, and ticket increases have a natural ceiling set by what a family will pay before the couch wins.
Set that against what the price requires. At $2.27 the market is paying about 97 times what this business earns in operating profit through a normal cycle, and to make that arithmetic work operating profit has to grow at the fastest rate the company can fund from its own cash flow and hold that rate for roughly nine years. Of comparable fast growers, only about 16% sustained a run that long. The near-term pace is not the stretch; the persistence is. The requirement is also sensitive in the wrong direction: each percentage point the growth rate falls short adds close to three more years to how long the run has to last.
Then there is the question of who owns the recovery when it arrives. The share count has compounded at roughly 51% a year over the four years to March 2026, and at the annual meeting held December 10, 2025 stockholders approved "an amendment to the Company's certificate of incorporation to increase the total number of authorized shares of Common Stock from 550,000,000 shares to 1,100,000,000 shares". Equity has been the funding instrument of choice, and every issuance divides the same eventual box office recovery among a larger group. An investor who was right about the industry in 2022 and held the whole way would still have watched their claim shrink to a fraction of itself.
The balance sheet is what forces those choices. Through-the-cycle operating profit covers only about a fifth of the interest bill, and the annual filing notes that a 100 basis point move in market rates would swing interest expense on the term loans by roughly $20.1 million in a year. The company states its own fallback plainly: "In the event the Company's revenues do not increase to at least pre-COVID-19 levels, we would seek to negotiate with creditors changes to our balance sheet liabilities". Renegotiating with creditors is a process in which the equity is the residual, and the residual is the variable. That sentence sits in the risk factors because it describes a live path, not a hypothetical one.
Valuation
Take today's quote as given and ask what it assumes. At $2.27 the market is paying about 97 times what this business earns in operating profit across a normal cycle, and the calculation deliberately uses the through-cycle figure rather than the trailing one, because trailing operating income is negative. The normal-cycle assumption is a 2% operating margin on a revenue base of roughly $5.0 billion. Sustaining that requires operating profit to compound at the fastest pace the company can fund internally, and to keep doing it for about nine years. Roughly 16% of comparable fast growers managed a run of that length. That is the bet, stated as plainly as it can be stated.
The methods used to triangulate the business disagree, and the disagreement is mostly about what is being valued rather than about the outlook. The sales-based lenses land far above where the shares trade, and they get there by applying a sector revenue multiple to the whole revenue base without first netting the borrowings that revenue has to service. That is a valuation of the business, not of the claim left over for shareholders, and on a company carrying this much debt the gap between those two things is most of the story. The forward-looking lenses split. One gets close to where the shares trade by holding the current sales multiple flat and crediting about 13% revenue growth, which is simply the recent pace tapered. The other model reaches a much higher number by assuming operating margins ramp from negative to the low teens over seven years. Neither is a forecast. Between them they say the equity has value in the scenario where the margin recovery actually arrives, and that nothing anchored on today's earnings has anything to work with, because today's earnings are negative.
Against the listed comparisons the position is unusual. Cinemark (CNK) produces about $3.2 billion of revenue at a 5.3% net margin and grew 6.9%. Madison Square Garden Entertainment (MSGE) runs a 12.2% operating margin on roughly $1.0 billion of revenue, and Live Nation (LYV) turns $25.6 billion of revenue into a 3.0% operating margin. AMC is the largest exhibitor in the group by revenue and the only member of it not converting revenue into profit. The operating result the price requires is demonstrably achievable in live and filmed entertainment. It is simply not what this company is currently producing.
Solvency draws the boundary around all of it. Through-the-cycle operating profit covers about a fifth of the interest bill, and the annual filing sizes that bill directly: "we have current and long-term cash interest payment requirements related to our corporate borrowings of $381.3 million and $769.0 million, respectively". Operations are not consuming cash at present, which is why the equity still trades on its prospects rather than on its wind-up value. The 10-K reports attendance of 155.8 million patrons and an average ticket 4.6% higher than the prior year, both real operating facts. The number of shares those facts have to be divided across has been compounding at roughly 51% a year over the four years to March 2026, which is faster than either of them has moved.
Catalysts
The second-quarter print landed on July 20, 2026 and carried the strongest operating numbers the company has posted since the pandemic. Revenue came in around $1.6 billion, up 14.2% year on year, with more than 71 million guests worldwide, attendance up 13.5%, and food, beverage and merchandise sales up 15.3% globally. Domestic ticket revenue grew 11.4% against industry growth of 10.7%, so the market share gain described in the annual filing continued into the current year, and European attendance rose 18%. The driver was the slate: the domestic box office reached $2.99 billion in the quarter, its best in seven years.
The refinancing track is the other live thread, and for a company with this capital structure it is arguably the more consequential one. In April 2026 the Odeon subsidiary refinanced $425 million of debt into a new 10.50% term loan due 2031, pushing out maturities and adding liquidity. Texas Capital upgraded the stock in July 2026, citing progress on refinancing and improved financial flexibility. The double-digit coupon is the honest cost of that flexibility, and it belongs alongside the interest requirements disclosed in the annual filing rather than read separately from them.
What to watch from here is narrow and specific. The next quarterly print will show whether the attendance recovery held once the summer slate thinned, and whether pricing continued to outrun the slow decline in the number of people walking in. Beyond that, any further maturity extension or debt exchange reshapes the equity claim more than a single quarter of box office does.
Peer Cohorts (Per Segment, With Filing Citations)
U.S. Markets / International Markets (reported)
- CNK (Cinemark Holdings, Inc.)
- FY2025 10-K: …2025-01-01 2025-12-31 0001385280 us-gaap:RestrictedStockUnitsRSUMember 2024-01-01 2024-12-31 0001385280 cnk:CusaMember cnk:TwoThousandTwentySevenMember 2025-01-01 2025-12-31 0001385280 cnk:RestrictedGroupMember srt:SubsidiariesMember 2025-12-31 0001385280 cnk:CinemarkUsaIncMember 2024-01-01 2024-12-31 0001385280…
- FY2025 10-K: :LeaseholdsAndLeaseholdImprovementsMember 2025-12-31 0001385280 cnk:DepreciationAndAmortizationMember 2023-01-01 2023-12-31 0001385280 us-gaap:OtherAffiliatesMember cnk:OtherInvestmentMember 2024-01-01 2024-12-31 0001385280 cnk:EquityLossMember 2023-12-31 0001385280 us-gaap:IntersegmentEliminationMember…
- LYV (LIVE NATION ENTERTAINMENT, INC.)
- FY2025 10-K: …2024-01-01 2024-12-31 0001335258 us-gaap:AccumulatedTranslationAdjustmentMember 2024-01-01 2024-12-31 0001335258 us-gaap:AccumulatedGainLossNetCashFlowHedgeParentMember 2024-12-31 0001335258 us-gaap:AccumulatedTranslationAdjustmentMember 2024-12-31 0001335258 us-gaap:AccumulatedGainLossNetCashFlowHedgeParentMember…
- FY2025 10-K: …2025-01-01 2025-12-31 0001335258 country:CA 2025-01-01 2025-12-31 0001335258 country:MX 2025-01-01 2025-12-31 0001335258 country:GB 2025-01-01 2025-12-31 0001335258 us-gaap:ForeignCountryMember 2025-01-01 2025-12-31 0001335258 us-gaap:RestrictedStockMember 2025-12-31 0001335258 us-gaap:RestrictedStockMember…
- MSGE (MADISON SQUARE GARDEN ENTERTAINMENT CORP.)
- FY2025 10-K: Member msge:AdvertisingSalesRepresentationAgreementMember 2022-07-01 2023-06-30 0001952073 msge:SphereEntertainmentMember msge:EdenLoanAgreementMember 2024-07-01 2025-06-30 0001952073 msge:SphereEntertainmentMember us-gaap:NotesPayableOtherPayablesMember msge:EdenLoanAgreementMember 2025-06-30 0001952073…
- FY2025 10-K: …Inc.) Restricted Stock Units Agreement (incorporated by reference to Exhibit 10.5 to the Company's Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q filed May 18, 2023). † 10.8 Form of Madison Square Garden Entertainment Corp. (formerly MSGE Spinco, Inc.) Performance Restricted Stock Units Agreement (incorporated by reference to Exhibit…
Methodology Note
- Priced-in inversion: the valuation is inverted on the current price to recover the operating-income growth, duration, and steady-state margin the price embeds (ROE for financials, FFO growth for REITs).
- Valuation x-ray: the valuation models, grouped into four families (asset, earnings, relative, growth). Each model is expressed as a price/FV ratio (distance from price), not a point fair-value estimate. The spread across families is the disagreement.
- Solvency: net cash/debt, net-debt-to-NOPAT, interest coverage, and share-count CAGR from EDGAR financials (net debt / FFO and fixed-charge coverage for REITs; regulatory-capital framing for financials).
- Peer cohorts: per-segment comparables with deep-linkable SEC filing citations.
Fundamentals sourced from SEC EDGAR filings. Current price from Databento. The priced-in inversion and valuation x-ray are computed by the boothcheck engine; narrative composed by AI from the structured data.
Sources
AMC Q2 2026 earnings release, July 2026 · AMC Q2 2026 earnings call, July 2026 · AMC refinancing announcement, April 2026 · Texas Capital analyst note, July 2026