Although the general public’s reaction to Paramount’s ongoing plans to foie gras Warner Bros. down its gullet has ranged somewhere between “Ugh” to “My rent is too high to care about this,” we’re happy to report that we’ve finally found someone—outside Paramount CEO David Ellison’s inner circle, or a Trump White house greedy to see its allies get their hooks into CNN—genuinely excited for the merger: AMC Entertainment CEO Adam Aron, who ran a gushing testimonial to the $110 billion deal in Variety on Wednesday.
In fact, Aron was so excited for the sale, and so effusive in his calls for “possibly well-intentioned state Attorneys General” to get out of the way of him and all those big, beautiful movies, that he ended up quoting the company’s Nicole Kidman-starring self-promotional ads not just once, but twice. (Calling the ad spot, in a hilarious effort to take credit for some unknown copywriter’s work, “the best one-liner synopsis that AMC ever has had written.”) Citing Rocky and The Shawshank Redemption in the span of the same sentence about the “underdog” revival of the nation’s theaters after the COVID-19 lockdown, Aron drooled over Ellison’s filmmaking bona fides, while also tossing shade at rival studios and tech companies who’ve helped train “the audience not to head out to theaters, but instead to wait patiently at home.” (While also making it clear that he’d still very much like those same tech companies to keep giving him “the movies,” thanks.)
Once you strip out paragraph after paragraph about “delicious popcorn,” “precious communal viewing,” and AMC’s “most successful quarter ever,” Aron’s argument boils down to this: He doesn’t really give a shit about “competition,” as long as the combined Paramount/Warner Bros. can keep rolling out movies at the pace Ellison has promised. (The voracious CEO has stated that the combined studio will release at least 30 movies theatrically per year, a massive number that some industry analysts have questioned the feasibility of; the ability of major studios to generate “blockbusters” has been at the center of some of the back-and-forth in the already running fight between the studio and those same state AGs.) Provided those films arrive on time—and Ellison sticks to a commitment of at least 45 days before films are offered on video on demand—Aron couldn’t care less about whose names run in front of them. (Part of the swagger of his editorial presumably coming from the fact that AMC, as the self-described biggest theater chain in the world, has pretty hefty negotiating power regardless of whether it’s dealing with four major studios or five.)
So, yeah: The biggest movie theater chain on the planet is throwing its weight beyond this merger, lest we all be subjected to the horrors of the “subscale competitors” that currently dominate the movie-making apparatus—and they’re not afraid to say the thing about heartbreak feeling good to try to get you onboard. Calling his company “a full-throated supporter” of the deal, Aron issued a faux-folksy “Well thanks, but no thanks” to the AGs hoping to block the deal on theaters’ behalf; as for the consumers who might not be super well-served by having a huge proportion of the year’s movies now running through one company’s oversight, Aron’s makes it pretty clear that he honestly couldn’t care less.
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