AMC, the US cinema brand that owns Odeon Cinemas, has confirmed that it will accept payments for film tickets and concessions in Bitcoin by the end of 2021.
Adam Aron, CEO of AMC, said the company has been looking into Bitcoin and ‘how else AMC can participate in this new burgeoning cryptocurrency universe’. The chain has not yet made it clear if the cinemas that it operates in Europe will offer customers the option to pay with Bitcoin.
Despite being a highly speculative currency with erratic price swings, Bitcoin has increasingly come into the mainstream fold as an accepted form of payment, with US mobile operator AT&T, Microsoft and Wikipedia all accepting the cryptocurrency.
In a conference call with journalists, Aron said ‘I've had to learn more in the past six months about blockchain and cryptocurrency than I learned about it in the entire decade before that’.
He went on to declare: ‘This increased knowledge has given me the confidence to tell you all today that AMC is hereby formally announcing... that by year's end we will have the information technology systems in place to accept Bitcoin’.
It has been suggested that AMC is attempting to appeal to young amateur traders who have invested heavily into the company’s shares over the past six months, consequently turning it into ‘meme stock’.
Organised on the social media platform Reddit, such investors have driven the price of AMC’s stock up by approximately 1,500% in 2021, though this has had little impact on the company’s actual financial performance.
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