AMC Theatres uses last year’s meme profits to buy tons of gold and silver

Last year was a weird one, and we’re not even referring to an ongoing pandemic, the failed domestic insurrection attempt, and whatever this was — we’re talking more specifically about that time meme jokes managed to bailout a global movie theater chain from imminent bankruptcy. Now that society is reopening many of its doors, AMC Theatres appears to have survived to upsell popcorn buckets to filmgoers another day, and they clearly learned nothing from all this.

The Hollywood Reporter revealed yesterday that AMC has bought a 22-percent stake in Hycroft Mining Holding Corp., a company in northern Nevada sitting on 15 million ounces of gold and 600 million ounces of silver deposits. The roughly $29.7 million endeavor is a “strategic investment” according to AMC Theatres CEO Adam Aron, who justified the decision as “the result of our having identified a company in an unrelated industry that appears to be just like AMC of a year ago. It, too, has rock-solid assets, but for a variety of reasons, it has been facing a severe and immediate liquidity issue.” Uh huh.

Paying it forward — We’re not exactly sold on the logic of a precious metals mining company as comparable to AMC “of a year ago,” but if there’s one thing AMC’s newest crop of shareholders love, it’s random investing for the hell of it in hopes of raking in stupid profits because modern capitalism is a cruel lottery game. In the current economy, “[Hycroft’s] share price has been knocked low as a result,” explained Aron in a statement. “We are confident that our involvement can greatly help it to surmount its challenges — to its benefit, and to ours.”

The most sensible recent decision — In some ways, AMC’s unorthodox investment strategy is the theater chain’s least egregious economic decision in recent memory. Since its nihilistic windfall, the company has announced an embrace of cryptocurrency payments including, yes, goddamn Dogecoin. Gold and silver, if nothing else, has always retained a certain worth. Perhaps AMC is attempting to play it safe (sort of) by switching investments to hard currencies instead of blockchain-based economics? Who knows. Either way, we still don’t feel great about going to see The Batman in theaters.