If you’re a member of AMC’s paid subscription loyalty programs, you’ll soon get another perk: the opportunity to reserve the best seats in the movie theater before anyone else.
On the theater chain’s earnings call on Tuesday, CEO Adam Aron said that later this year, AMC will add a new perk for its A-List and Premiere Stubs members as they will get priority access to seats that the chain will “block and reserve” for them.
This perk will come at no additional charge and will join other perks for Premiere and A-List members, most notably the ability to watch four movies per week in any format for A-List members. The A-List membership is available for $27.99/month while the Premiere membership, which does not have the four movies per week perk, is available for $18.99/month.
“We think it will be a considerable consumer benefit that our most frequent guests will notice and greatly appreciate, further submitting their brand loyalty to AMC,” Aron said.
This priority access perk is a tweak to a previous attempt by AMC to put a premium on center-of-house seats. In 2023, AMC launched a pilot program called Sightline, which introduced variable pricing to screenings by charging in-demand, preferred seats at a premium while offering seats in the front row of the auditorium for the same screening at a discount.
AMC abandoned Sightline after testing it at three locations, saying that while their most frequent moviegoers continued to buy preferred seats even at a surcharge, the promise of a discount for lower-demand seats was met with disinterest by customers.
A longtime part of the movie theater business in Europe, movie theater subscription packages were adopted by many major theater chains in North America after the rise and fall of MoviePass, as American customers who attended theaters multiple times in a month were offered the chance to do so for a monthly subscription price equivalent to what they would pay for one ticket and a popcorn.
Last summer, AMC reported that it was approaching 1 million A-List subscribers, and has also rolled out a similar program called the Popcorn Pass, which offers a year-long 50% discount for large popcorn purchases for just $29.99.
