Regal Execs Say Their Ticket Prices Will Rise Nearly 4% This Year
CEO Amy Miles seems confident that consumers will continue to flock to theaters, even with the higher admission costs. “Sometimes we joke and say we are an industry that has been dying for the past 50 years,” she told investors today at Barclays Global Technology, Media and Telecommunications Conference. But “as long as we continue to provide that great, affordable out-of-home experience…people are going to continue to go to the movies.” What’s “affordable” is in the eye of the beholder: Regal CFO David Ownby told the group that his company’s ticket prices for 2D movies “will go up in that 3% to 4% range” that’s been the pattern over the last few years. He notes that for IMAX movies Regal adds as much as $6.50 to the price of the basic 2D ticket. The chain’s own RPX large-screen venues have as much as a $5.00 upcharge while regular 3D films cost about $3.50 more than conventional 2D. This year’s potential blockbusters should help the cause.“When you start with Iron Man 3 a couple of weekends ago and you just look at the film slate over the balance of the summer, it’s hard not to get excited about what’s to come,” Miles says. “And it doesn’t stop when the summer” is over. Indeed, Ownby says that for the end of 2013 “we again have a film slate that I think stacks up pretty well” against the strong releases from the last quarter of 2012. On other matters the execs said that they continue to see opportunities to acquire theaters. And they’ve yet to see a significant change at AMC Entertainment since last year when it was acquired by China’s Wanda Group. “We’re partnered a lot with AMC, and we have a lot of ventures where we work together and we can say from that perspective it seems to us that it’s business as usual,” Miles says.
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