In case it isn’t clear to you, this is a rather massive stance to take, as what we are seeing here is the biggest theater chain in the world going toe-to-toe with one of the biggest movie studios in the world. Universal has a rather massive slate of films set to come out in the next couple of years, including F9, Halloween Kills, Jurassic Park: Dominion, and Minions: The Rise Of Gru, and by not releasing them AMC Theaters is sacrificing the sale of a lot of tickets a.k.a profit. The problem for the studio is that it’s going to be seriously hard for those titles to make money if they aren’t playing in the 10,000+ AMC locations around the world.
Taking things a step further, Adam Aron’s letter also notes that his company’s policy won’t necessarily be limited to the current conflict with Universal. He notes that the same moves will be made against any company that makes moves to significantly disrupt the current status of theatrical and digital distribution. The executive wrote,