Sean Goodman : Adam, with that, should we go to some questions from our shareholders?
Adam Aron: Please let’s do.
Sean Goodman : Unless there are any questions from equity analysts. But I think at this point as questions from our shareholders. So the first question, Adam, is about alternative content, and we’ve spoken a lot about Taylor Swift. But the question is, can you talk more about future opportunities? And what other sort of content are we considering to bring into our theaters?
Adam Aron: Well, given that — in one of our most important forays in the alternate content, we just added $0.25 billion to the world’s box office and 165 of that is in the United States alone. I don’t think anybody has been chasing all the content more aggressively than AMC. Clearly, this whole genre of concert films is something that we’ve learned. There’s a lot of demand for out there, and so we’ll chase it hard. But it’s not limited to concert artists. I continue to think that professional sports is an enormous opportunity for the movie theater industry. If you think watching a football game on your 45-inch or 55-inch or 65-inch TV at home looks good, imagine how it looks on a 45-foot or a 55-foot or a 65-foot screen at an AMC theater.
And so I think the second thing that you’ll see us chasing beyond these concert films is sports. It’s been a multiyear effort to try to get the rights to do so, but it’s something that we are in active pursuit of as we speak. And then beyond that, there’s all sorts of other content whether it’s ethnic film product like Bollywood products or some Asian language film or Hispanic language film, we can bring here in the United States. That — those are opportunities that we’re already pursuing and our year-over-year growth are small, but our year-over growth in those segments has been quite high. We’ve had a partnership with [Indiscernible] for a long time where they bring lots of other interesting content to our screens as well. So clearly, there’s an opportunity here and it’s Taylor Swift demonstrated that it can be sizable dollars if it’s done right.
So it’s clearly on AMC’s radar screen.
Sean Goodman : A lot of interest in our food and beverage offerings. And there’s a question about other than popcorn, what are our other food and beverage initiatives and what plans do we have to bring other AMC products food and beverage products through retail distribution channels.
Adam Aron: If there’s one area where we can take enormous pride at AMC, it’s what’s happened to our F&B business and the last years. Prior to the pandemic, F&B spending was about $5 a head in round numbers at AMC. And these are domestic numbers that I’m using right now. And post-pandemic, it’s been about $8 ahead. That increase of $3 a head is meaningful when you think that we have a very high-margin food and beverage business. I often joke that we sell air and water. We sell pop worn and soft drinks. And so it’s a very profitable business for us. And the fact that we’ve seen such an increase in the spending per patron is very beneficial to us. Other chains also have seen increases in their food and beverage capture, but I continue to believe that of the — not the so-called dine-in — the small dine-in theater chains.
But the mass market brands, our food and beverage capture continues to be the highest in the industry. And it’s no accident. We work at getting an interesting variety of products at our dine-in theaters and on the concession shelves in our non-dining theaters. We’ve — and there continues to be opportunity. So the thing we’re doing right now, of course, on this call, I announced that we’re launching AMC Silver Suites this month and next, about quarter inch of pretzel, about 4 inches of chocolate on top of the pretzel. It’s a lot of chocolate. It’s a really good chocolate too, and we’re optimistic so we’re going to start with that in our theaters first. But just like we proved that we could take AMC Perfectly popcorn to the home. If we see that there are big sales of the embassy Cinema suite, in our theaters, we might take that out to the outside world the same way we took Perfectly Popcorn to Walmart, Kroger’s, Publix and Amazon.com.
So it’s been a great success story for us. And we continue to look for ways to grow further. As one last one, they’re growing it further part. I think what’s so fascinating to me is how successful we’ve been with merchandise, movie themed that’s being sold at our concession stands just about every week in the year now. We’re selling anywhere from 100,000 of these things a weekend to 1 million of these things the weekend. And we’re selling to a handsome profit. And whether it’s a 10 popcorn tub for Taylor Swift’s movie or Pink corvette for Barbie movie or any other array of creative things that we’ve introduced over the course of the year, title by title by title by title. We’re driving a lot of business now with these things, and we really keep that going in 2024 as well.
Sean Goodman : So let’s talk a little bit more about the operating improvements that we have done since the beginning of 2020, which are clearly evident in our results for this quarter. And the questions about those operating improvements that we’ve made that will really allow AMC to thrive in the future.
Adam Aron: So we had no choice. We had to get more efficient. Because during the ravages of the pandemic, we had no revenues. And so we’ve gotten this company to be much leaner than it ever was before. The head count in our corporate headquarters is way down. The managerial head count in our theaters is way down. In the case of our European theaters, we’ve automated so many of them with automated box offices and automated food beverage operations. We’re starting to bring the automated food and beverage guests back into the United States as well. We had to get more efficient, and we did get more efficient. You in your prepared remarks talked about the progress we made with landlords where we renegotiated our rents downwards to the tune of tens of millions of dollars of benefits a year.
Also, we’ve just gotten more efficient in terms of what’s in our fleet. As you said, we’ve closed about 150 marginal theaters that were either marginally profitable or not — or money losers and replace them with 50 theaters that are enormous successes. The 50 theaters that we opened are grossing far more than the 150 theaters that we closed and yet our operating expenses, by definition, are the third of what they were to operate triple the theater count. So just in area after area, after area, this company has gotten leaner and more efficient. And that’s something that drove these third quarter results, which are so good. If you look at — the number is hard you’ll still see attendance was off 16% compared to 2019. And if attendance is up 16% that’s 16% fewer bodies that you can sell food and beverage too.
