Adam Aron, the CEO of AMC Theatres, has shockingly admitted to leaking sensitive information about Beyoncé’s Renaissance concert film. According to reports obtained by The Source, the leaks nearly sabotaged the concert film’s success. The admission comes just after the successful and secret release of Taylor Swift’s Eras concert film.
AMC managed to keep Swift’s concert a secret, and Aron explained that secrecy is essential to a film’s success. The theater chain has plans to release “two to three concert films annually.”
“We couldn’t blow Taylor’s secret,” Aron said. He described maintaining confidentiality as a strategic move. “And those theater chains who groused at you? They grossed $100 million in ticket sales. It’s not like they sold diddly.”
When Beyoncé dropped her Renaissance film, though, the AMC executive admitted that the secret wasn’t kept as well as it should have been. AMC gave several of its competitors an early “heads up” about Beyoncé film’s upcoming release to prevent the tension caused by Swift’s film being released. Although they took precautions to try and keep it contained, Aron admitted, “At least half a dozen movie circuits leaked the news. Beyoncé was seriously thinking about not doing the movie at all because the secret was blown. So, they didn’t keep their word.”
Aron called the leak a primary source of frustration between the AMC team and Beyoncé since they jeopardized the successful release of Beyoncé’s film. Swift’s Eras concert film grossed a lot of profit with significant ticket sales, further showing the secretive approach’s importance.
To support their ambitious release schedule vision, AMC has put together a distribution team to gain exclusive advanced knowledge of concert films like Swift and Beyoncé’s. This allows the AMC chain to sell tickets before its competitors do.
AMC’s new move into film distribution will be a “bold expansion of its business model,” but it has also increased tension between AMC theaters and its more traditional Hollywood partners, who feel AMC is pushing too far into their territory.
