Eric Wold: Last News

B. Riley analyst Eric Wold, who has stayed generally bullish on the movie theater business despite its recent trials, is now warning investors that the arrival of a “down box office year” has made him “increasingly cautious.”

box office are due to higher ticket prices,” says Eric Handler, managing director at Roth Capital Partners. “Theaters need to do a better job of promoting the cinema experience and getting people to come back.” Over the past few years, the movie business has suffered one setback after another. First, COVID shuttered theaters for months, prompting a wave of release-date delays, and halted filming on major movies, which only resumed with costly new health measures in place that added millions to budgets.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter Without Taylor Swift and Martin Scorsese, the October box office would have been a ghost town long before Halloween hit. It was thanks to two unconventional releases — “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” and “Killers of the Flower Moon,” one distributed by an exhibitor and the other backed by a major streaming service — that anyone went to the movies at all. It may get worse before it gets better.

Despite having new fundraising options in the wake of a judge’s ruling on Friday, AMC Entertainment started the week on a jarring note as its stock price skidded to its lowest level since January 2021.

The judge in a case brought by meme stock shareholders against AMC Entertainment declined to approve a settlement unveiled earlier this week that would have allowed the exhibitor to move ahead with plans to convert its AMC Preferred Equity units (APEs) to common stock, among other measures.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter It may have been implausible a few years, heck, even a few months ago, that tech giants like Apple and Amazon would spend billions on theatrical movies. And yet, Apple is reportedly planning to invest $1 billion per year to make films that’ll play exclusively in cinemas. The news, which was first announced by Bloomberg, comes months after Amazon’s similar commitment to putting 12 to 15 new movies in theaters annually. Could it be that newer Hollywood players actually care about the big screen? “Having multiple large streaming platforms decide they need theaters shows there is value to theatrical, which was the biggest concern,” says Eric Wold, a media and entertainment industry analyst with B. Riley Securities.

Veteran exhibition analyst Eric Wold of B. Riley has given Cinemark stock a big shot in the arm, so to speak, upgrading it to “buy” from “neutral” and doubling his price target.