Adam Aron, the CEO of the world’s largest movie chain, AMC Theatres, saw his pay rise nearly 30 percent year-over-year as he navigates the exhibitor through a box office rollercoaster.
The theater chief received $14.97 million in total compensation for 2025, per a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday. That’s up from $11.3 million in 2024 but below the levels that the executive had been paid in the company’s post-memestock years of 2022 and 2023 ($23.7 million and $25.4 million, respectively).
The 71-year-old exec is in his tenth year of running AMC, which boasts 860 theater locations globally. Of his 2025 pay, $1.55 million was base pay, $7.38 million was from stock awards while $6 million came from the company’s non-equity incentive plan.
Last year, the domestic box office — led by Disney’s Lilo & Stitch and Legendary/Warner Bros. A Minecraft Movie — saw only a slight uptick, to about $8.87 billion. AMC’s stock, meanwhile, fell around 58 percent during the course of 2025.
Aron often has defiant and colorful words — he referred to “prognosticators of doom who have continued to vastly underestimate the will and the skill of AMC” on a July 20 earnings call — for skeptics of his strategy to prop up the debt-laden exhibitor.
This year domestic box office grosses are running more than 10 percent ahead of 2025 so far. And AMC has sidelined a plan to show live concerts in its locations due to the boom in unexpected box office hits (like A24’s Backrooms and Focus’ Obsession) that have helped fuel a rebound.
Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster The Odyssey has only added momentum (even if Imax may be arguably benefiting more than AMC). Year-to-date AMC stock is up 40 percent even as it trades at just $2.28 a share.
“More than 71 million guests visited our theaters worldwide in the second quarter, 13.5 percent more than last year, drawn by one of the most powerful and diverse film slates that we’ve seen in years,” Aron told Wall Street analysts on the chain’s second quarter earnings call. He later added, “We also increased AMC’s market share as our domestic ticket revenues were up by even more, up by some 11.4 percent.”
Elsewhere in the AMC Theatres C-Suite, chief financial officer Sean Goodman saw his pay rise to $4.9 million while chief operations and marketing officer David Ellis saw compensation upped to $2.47 million.
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