Mike Hickey: But on your screen count, just to sort of piggyback off the first question you look at, obviously, you’re optimizing here, which is a good thing, and it’s accretive, which is also a really good thing. But when you look at your screen count, your network, you’re sorted down looks like 10% versus where you were pre-pandemic. And of course, you moved the other direction historically and created a lot of value. And I know that sounds like you’re incrementally more positive maybe on the M&A market, but just curious if, philosophically or otherwise, you’re still motivated here to grow your screen count. And when you look at, you know, the deals that are starting to come through, you say you’re not interested. Is that you’re not interested, say, in the asset that you’re looking at?
Is it the price? Is it both? Is it protecting your balance sheet, just given how much you still don’t know about ’24 slate, maybe the economy? Just curious because, you know, we hold the 79 theaters through, you know, the next couple of years. I think it’s less appealing than baking in some sort of M&A as part of your philosophy in driving growth. Thanks, guys.
GregMarcus: Look, at the end of the day, it is ultimately – I’ll work backwards on what we would acquire for anything. It would be simply – it has to have good economics. And we’re not seeing the economics that we’d want to see at this point. And the – because at the end of the day, we believe in growth, you know, that we believe that it’s important to grow our businesses. And the – so that’s the goal. But on the other hand – but really, the end of day is to have the most cash flow at the bottom line. You know, it feels good to say that I’m a certain size, but I’d rather have more cash flow at the bottom line. And, you know, that’s how we think about stuff, and so – but we can do both. But we are just going to have – but we’ll be patient and deliberate as we’ve always have been, and then when we see the opportunities, we’ll move.
Mike Hickey: Thanks, guys.
Chad Paris: Thanks, Mike.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Jim Goss of Barrington Research. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Jim Goss: All right, thanks much. You mentioned earlier in explaining why the apparent underperformance, despite the strong gain in revenues, might have related somewhat to your recovering sooner than the rest of the industry, which recovered a little later. Are you – do you think you’re now running at what you might consider a more comparable basis such that the comps would be more true going forward?
Chad Paris: It seems like it, Jim. If you look at the comparisons to 2019 that I shared on the Call, you’ll notice that we were basically in line in the third quarter, but still ahead on a year-to-date basis. So that catch-up has been progressing throughout the course of the year. And, you know, you remember we were open much earlier. So rehabitualizing the customer to movie going, I think, happened in our circuit sooner, and that certainly benefited us in 2022 last year, which was evidenced by the outperformance numbers that we reported a year ago. So it seems like we’re – everybody is sort of getting back on par here as we get to the latter part of the year.
GregMarcus: Yes, I think it just gets modulated by…
Jim Goss: Okay.
GregMarcus: I think it just gets modulated by now by product. You know, It’s not going to be huge amounts of, you know, but it just sort of tilts. So, for example, we – as we talked about in the remarks, a good slate of family stuff should adhere to our benefit, you know, over the – you know, for the holidays.
Chad Paris: Which hurt us in the third quarter comparison….
Jim Goss: Okay.
Chad Paris: Versus Q3 last year because we had two films that we pointed out that where we really outperformed the market versus the mix that we had this year, which we did well on, but not as well as we did in terms of overperformance last year.
