At CinemaCon this past April, two different studio distribution chiefs made the pitch to theater owners in attendance that perhaps Tuesdays shouldn’t be the only days that movie theaters offer discounts.
“As Jews, we ask why is Passover different from all other nights? I ask you, why is Tuesday different from all your other weekdays? Not because we eat unleavened popcorn,” Sony’s Tom Rothman said during his studio presentation. It’s because the grosses are higher on Tuesday, a direct result of prices being lower and boosting attendance. So why not make Monday or Wednesday more like Tuesday?
Paramount’s Chris Aronson made a similar pitch for Discount Wednesdays, which he said was a fine idea unless, of course, your movie theaters are already full on Wednesday nights. He also pitched theaters on showing fewer trailers and ads, other price changing experimentation, daily deals, making matinee pricing last later in the day, and more gimmicks like the BYOB popcorn bucket.
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Some of that fell on deaf ears, especially considering that theater owners argued studios should be consistent about a 45-day theatrical window, another thing that probably won’t happen with any consistency. But at least one theater chain, not coincidentally the biggest one in North America, might have been listening.
On Monday, AMC announced that its Stubs members will be able to access 50 percent off Wednesdays, this is on top of the other (generally even lower) discounts AMC already offers on Tuesdays to its Stubs members. The discounts start on July 9 (just in time for “Superman”) and will continue every Wednesday thereafter, with the exception of on holidays or excluding certain films. Premium fees still apply if you’re seeing a movie in IMAX, on a PLF, or in 3D, but the base ticket price will be half-off.
The one key difference is that, while discounted Tuesdays vary by market or even individual theaters, AMC’s plan with Wednesdays is consistent: half-off ticket prices for all Stubs members.
AMC CEO Adam Aron said in an accompanying statement with the announcement that with the levels the box office was at previously, they couldn’t afford to make this change, but with the box office again on the upswing (thanks, “Minecraft”!), now was the right time. Aron said that Tuesday has turned into one of the best-attended days of the week because of the discounts, and they hope to make Wednesdays the same.
He’s right, and it’s been that way ever since discounted Tuesdays started becoming the industry standard around 2017. Through the first 19 weeks of 2025 so far, Tuesdays have outgrossed Monday, Wednesday, or Thursday at the domestic box office by a healthy margin, bringing in $201 million thus far according to data from Comscore, despite tickets being significantly cheaper. That was true in 2019 as well, when Tuesday was the highest weekday in terms of overall gross for the year.
It makes sense that AMC would want to squeeze more out of its Wednesdays if it can do for that day what it’s done for Tuesday. It also helps get more people signing up for its free Stubs program, which currently has 36 million members, and then hopefully its paid subscription service A-List and its various tiers.
The question is if other exhibitors will follow AMC’s lead and launch their own discount Wednesdays? Not so fast. It took years for exhibitors to adopt discount Tuesdays across the board, a combination of the federal government preventing an entire industry from collaborating on pricing and the studios themselves unwilling to allow theaters to be flexible. Exhibitors are bound by regional per-caps, which is an agreement with the studios that they pay a share based on the average ticket price relative to the region that movie theater is in. If a theater were to charge below the average, they’d effectively be penalized because the average ticket price share is already agreed upon.
For that same reason, other distributors don’t love it when one rival distributor tinkers with pricing, such as when Paramount offered all-day matinee pricing for “80 for Brady” in order to appeal to the senior crowd. That gambit helped Paramount put more butts in seats, but it lowered the average everyone else saw, so other studios tend to oppose it.
But, as AMC is the largest exhibitor in North America, the chain has the ability to push against studio wishes in a way smaller chains wouldn’t. AMC declined to comment on if it had coordinated in advanced discussions with the studios about the price changes.
The real benefit of having an additional discounted day is that people would use it to see a film they might have skipped otherwise. The people who frequent Tuesday and perhaps soon Wednesday screenings are the ones seeing a film on its third or fourth week in theaters and to whom price matters most.
Patrick Corcoran of The Fithian Group told IndieWire the challenge theaters face now is he believes that, with shorter windows before a movie hits streaming, theaters are directly competing with the price offered at home, and they don’t have the flexibility to compete by dynamically pricing movies individually the way just about every other industry does.
Should Wednesdays become the new Tuesdays, it could be one step toward movie theaters clawing back some of that audience from their couch.
