When you buy a movie ticket, the cinema does not own the film it is showing. It rents it from a distributor, usually one of the big studios, and the rent is mostly a share of the box office. AMC, which calls itself the world's largest theatrical exhibition company, explains in its annual report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission that these fees are usually set film by film and theatre by theatre, based on how each movie sells.
The report for 2025 puts a number on it. AMC sold $2,652.8 million in tickets and recorded $1,275.2 million in film exhibition costs, which is 48.1% of ticket sales. In its US cinemas the share was higher, 51.2%. Seven big distributors, including Disney, Warner Bros., Universal and Sony, supplied films behind about 83% of AMC's US ticket sales.
Food and drinks work very differently. AMC sold $1,671.3 million in food and beverages in 2025 and spent $327.0 million on those products, or 19.6% of what it sold them for. In the US that share was 18.1%. So on a dollar of popcorn and soda, about 80 cents is left after the snacks themselves are paid for, compared with about 52 cents on a dollar of tickets.
The company also reports what an average visitor spends. Across its 219 million visits in 2025, the average ticket price was $12.09 and food and drink sales came to $7.62 per visitor, a figure that includes everyone who bought nothing. Take out the film costs and the food costs, and the ticket left about $6.27 while the snacks left about $6.13. The snacks bring in almost as much as the ticket even though visitors spend less on them.
None of that is profit yet. Both amounts still have to pay for staff, rent, electricity and the seats themselves, and AMC's rent alone was $887.3 million in 2025. The company reported a net loss of $632.4 million for the year. The numbers explain why cinemas care so much about the concession stand: it is the part of the visit where most of the money stays in the building.
