UPDATED: AMC CEO Adam Aron on this afternoon’s Q2 earnings call verified what we first reported: The No. 1 circuit has plans to cut down its preshow.
Last month, in a deal with National CineMedia, AMC added more ad time in an effort to earn more bucks. Studio executives raised their pitchforks in anger, especially after AMC made it known to consumers in advance that there’s 25-30 minutes of preshow.
AMC’s plans to shorten the preshow doesn’t mean they’re cutting out the new ad window, as that agreement with NCM has just commenced.
“We think we can shave four or five minutes out of it. So it’s not that there’s been a change of heart,” Aron said on an call with analysts after his company reported Q2 2025 earnings Monday. “We always knew that when we did the NCM deal, that we would probably have to shorten at the same time we’re lengthening, so that those two changes to vectors offset each other and balance each other out.”
How is that four- to five-minute edit of the preshow comprised? Aron said that in AMC’s own internal preshow study that included rival circuits, they noticed that AMC ran one extra trailer compared with the competition. That’s at least 2 1/2 minutes right there that can be cut, per Aron. There’s also another 2-3 minutes of AMC’s own internal promos (i.e., “Silence Your Cellphones” and “Silence Is Golden”) that’s also up for being edited out, as well as 15 seconds from a one-minute Imax promotional piece.
“Some consumers love the trailer packages because they get to see what’s coming, and we know our studio partners love the trailer packages because the best form of advertising that they’ll find anywhere is putting their movie product right in front of faces. But we also know that some of our other consumers think the package has gone too long, and we’re trying to find a happy medium,” said Aron.
Aron explained upon being asked by an analyst about the preshow that AMC entered into the ad agreement with NCM as they felt they were leaving tens of millions on the table. Such lost monies were crucial for AMC to earn and they noticed Regal and Cinemark’s market share wasn’t being impacted with extra NCM ads in their preshows. The AMC deal with NCM was inked at the start of the year when the box office was bleak.