AMC Shares Pop On Rumors of an Amazon Takeover

Shares of struggling AMC Entertainment were rising on Monday as rumors spread that e-commerce giant Amazon could purchase the company.

AMC’s stock has been down around 50% on the year and the company has struggled as theaters have been closed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Shares popped 40% on Monday after an unconfirmed report surfaced in the British tabloid the Daily Mail that Amazon is interested in buying the global theater chain. AMC’s market capitalization was about $427 million when the news broke. The company had a market cap of $752 million at the end of 2019.

According to the Daily Mail report, AMC and Amazon have at some point held talks about a takeover, though it was unclear if those talks were still ongoing. It was a few hours later that Deadline said that there were in fact no talks, according to unnamed sources. Neither AMC nor Amazon immediately commented.

China’s Wanda Group owns AMC and the company is nearly $5 billion in debt.

It was last month that AMC said it would refuse to show Universal films in its theaters when they re-open after Jeff Shell, the CEO of Universal parent company NBCUniversal, indicated in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that the studio would release films both digitally and in theaters once the pandemic ends.