AMC Entertainment Holdings, which runs the largest movie theater chain in the U.S., will begin accepting bitcoin payments for tickets and concessions by the end of the year, the company’s CEO, Adam Aron, said on a second-quarter earnings call Monday.
“We are also in the preliminary stage of now exploring how else AMC can participate in this new burgeoning cryptocurrency universe and we’re quite intrigued by potentially lucrative business opportunities for AMC if we intelligently pursue further serious involvement with cryptocurrency,” Aron said.
AMC did not specify what technology it would use to process the payments. The company has 593 theaters in the U.S. and 335 international locations.
Aron said that AMC will also begin accepting Apple Pay and Google Pay payments by the end of 2021.
AMC’s stock was trading at roughly $33 Monday morning. After the earnings release, the stock jumped 13.2% before falling to about $35 at the time of publication.
During the Reddit-driven retail trading frenzy earlier this year, so-called “meme stocks” like GameStop and AMC soared in value. AMC’s pivot to bitcoin payments suggests the struggling movie theater chain sees value in cryptocurrencies.