logo
AMC to offer half-off movie tickets on Wednesdays this summer. What to know

AMC to offer half-off movie tickets on Wednesdays this summer. What to know

Miami Herald13-05-2025

AMC is rolling out deep discounts for moviegoers this summer.
Starting July 9, the theater chain will offer half-off adult movie tickets for AMC Stubs rewards members every Wednesday at AMC Theatres nationwide, the company said in a May 12 news release.
The '50% off Wednesdays' discount will be available in addition to the Tuesday ticket discount currently offered to rewards members, AMC said.
'Realistically, we could not afford to have made this change to our ticket pricing strategy until the box office showed true signs of sustained recovery,' AMC CEO Adam Aron said in the release, pointing to 'booming' box office numbers in April and May.
According to CNN Business, the theater giant struggled to stay afloat in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and dual Hollywood strikes, prompting several changes, including an overhaul of its in-theater offerings and an investment in concert films.
Attendance at AMC's U.S. theaters was down nearly 12% in the first quarter of 2025 compared to the previous year, per an earnings report published this month.
Building on the success of its 'Discount Tuesdays' program, Aron said the theater chain hopes to turn 'Wednesday into a similarly strong-attendance day for moviegoers.'
'The remainder of 2025 appears poised to continue that upward box office trend,' he said.
Moviegoers will pay more for premium formats like IMAX and RealD 3D, but the 50% discount will be applied to the base price for those tickets as well, AMC said.
Certain films and holiday times may be excluded, though the chain didn't give specifics.
Blockbusters set to hit the silver screen this summer include 'Jurassic World Rebirth,' 'Superman' and Marvel's 'The Fantastic Four: First Steps,' Rolling Stone reported.
Find your nearest AMC Theatre here.

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

U.S. imports see largest plunge on record in April
U.S. imports see largest plunge on record in April

Axios

time15 minutes ago

  • Axios

U.S. imports see largest plunge on record in April

U.S. goods imports plummeted in April, per data out Thursday, as President Trump's tariff policies rocked the global trade system. Why it matters: The decline is a sharp reversal of the front-loading effect the previous month, when firms raced to import stuff before the tariffs took hold. Zoom in: The monthly drop in imports is the largest on record, per the Commerce Department. Imports were still up from this time last year, however. The big picture: Trade with China fell to its lowest point since a historic pandemic shut the global economy. April imports from China, at $25.4 billion, were the lowest since March 2020 ($19.6 billion). And U.S. exports to the country also fell off a cliff to $8.2 billion — compared to $7.9 billion, as COVID-19 first hit the U.S. What they're saying: "It sure looks as though triple-digit tariff rates made a difference to trade flows, eh?" writes Carl Weinberg, chief economist at High Frequency Economics, in a note Thursday morning. The data is not really a sign of a weakening economy — unlike in the pandemic, companies stockpiled ahead of the tariff shock, and are now going to be drawing down elevated inventories of goods, he writes.

SMBs Go Global: 3 Ways Bank Partnerships Can Transform The Small Business Payments Experience
SMBs Go Global: 3 Ways Bank Partnerships Can Transform The Small Business Payments Experience

Forbes

time32 minutes ago

  • Forbes

SMBs Go Global: 3 Ways Bank Partnerships Can Transform The Small Business Payments Experience

By Jeff Koyen America's small and medium-sized businesses ('SMBs') employ almost half (46%) of the U.S. workforce, about 59 million people,[1] and account for 43.5% of the country's GDP.[2] They're also firmly on the rebound as quarterly small business employment growth returns to pre-Covid levels.[3] Meanwhile, SMBs are becoming more globalized and connected around the world. According to PCMI market research commissioned by Visa, nearly one-third of American SMBs make cross-border payments—international transactions that often help them manage suppliers, customers and operations.[4] getty Yet some major financial institutions fail to meet these clients' needs—especially when it comes to fast, efficient and cost-effective cross-border payments. Forzley co-founded VEEM (which stands for 'Very Easy Exchange of Money') to solve these problems. In 2022, the San Francisco-based payments platform joined a number of other digital financial services platforms that are partnering with Visa Direct to remove friction from global payments. So how can financial technology (fintech) innovators like VEEM close the gap between global payment expectations and real-world experiences? And how can that, in turn, help banks deliver new solutions for small businesses? Below, explore three ways financial institutions can use emerging fintech to create a better banking experience for their SMB customers. As every entrepreneur and executive knows, your business is only as strong as its balance sheet. For SMBs that rely on overseas suppliers and customers, managing cash flow can be a huge challenge. Due to the limitations of traditional banking, the process of getting paid and paying suppliers can take several days, even weeks. That's not a problem for Fintechs, like VEEM, that connect to the Visa Direct network. Without Visa Direct, payment platforms often rely on existing global banking infrastructure, such as SWIFT and correspondent banking, which do not meet the demands of most modern SMBs. Settling payments on traditional networks can take days. Visa, meanwhile, provides day-after settlement, which allows clients and partners, and their SMB customers, to send funds more quickly to payees and beneficiaries. Visa Direct also brings greater transparency to global payment processes, which was the case for VEEM. With Visa Direct, SMB customers can instead know exactly where their money is—helping them make more informed decisions. Visa Direct helps financial institutions to solidify account primacy by embedding real-time cross-border capabilities that keep SMBs transacting within their ecosystem—reducing outflows to other providers, improving future cross-sell opportunities. The digital economy may be global, but currency exchange rates remind us that borders still exist. When sending and receiving payments, SMBs can find themselves at the mercy of exchange rates. Imagine sending $1,000 to an overseas supplier on Monday morning, only to learn it's worth $950 when the payment finally clears. Real-time payments help solve this problem by reducing the settlement lifecycle. Visa Direct also offers its banking clients another tool: multi-currency accounts. Traditional banking institutions, on the other hand, convert foreign currencies according to their own schedule. Clients have no control or visibility into the process, potentially leaving a lot of money on the exchange rate table. For SMBs that regularly transact with the same overseas customers and suppliers, converting between currencies may not even be necessary. Using multi-currency accounts, they can hold funds in foreign currency and use these accounts to conduct their back-and-forth business. While foreign exchange fluctuations are unavoidable, these types of tools allow SMBs to have more control and visibility. Visa Direct enables financial institutions to offer multi-currency solutions that increase deposits and generate new revenue streams while giving SMBs more flexibility and control—all within the bank's branded environment. All too often, small and medium-sized organizations can feel ignored when their banks scale up to go after bigger enterprises. SMBs working across borders may feel this even more keenly with, for example, new fee schedules that benefit higher-volume clients. In Meszaros' view, ignoring those SMB pain points is a mistake. The issue may be one of perception: Modern small businesses extend far beyond the local grocery stores or mom-and-pop pharmacies that were once unlikely to expand beyond regional markets. Today's SMBs are comprised of startups, innovators, eager entrepreneurs and others seeking opportunities for growth. When banks stop paying attention to the changing SMB landscape, they may—inadvertently or not—remove the features, functions and favorable fees that help SMBs compete in global markets. When financial institutions overlook these evolving needs, they risk ceding ground to more agile fintechs that are actively courting SMBs with tailored, tech-forward offerings. The result? A gradual erosion of wallet share, weakened brand loyalty and a missed opportunity to grow long-term, high-value relationships with the next generation of business customers. Financial institutions that ignore small business needs may also find that their SMB customers start looking for other providers to fulfill them. In the case of VEEM, Forzley embraces the SMB market as an enormous opportunity. His company's partnership with Visa Direct, he adds, 'has been instrumental in making our vision a reality.' By leveraging Visa Direct, financial institutions can differentiate in a competitive market by launching SMB-first solutions that deepen engagement, build loyalty and position themselves as an innovation partner. *Actual funds availability depends on receiving financial institution and region. [1] U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 'Small businesses contributed 55 percent of the total net job creation from 2013 to 2023', May 2024. [2] U.S. Small Business Administration, 'Frequently Asked Questions About Small Business, 2024', July 2024. [3] U.S. Small Business Administration, 'Economic Bulletin, Fourth Quarter 2024', January 2025. [4] Visa PCMI Payments & Commerce Market Intelligence, 'SMB Payments–Visa Direct Market Fit Analysis', July 2024.

Opinion - What globalists get wrong about free trade
Opinion - What globalists get wrong about free trade

Yahoo

timean hour ago

  • Yahoo

Opinion - What globalists get wrong about free trade

Since at least the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, major media outlets have decried the impending end of globalization. These lamentations have only accelerated since the Trump administration declared April 2 'Liberation Day,' with our trading counterparties' unfair practices to be summarily addressed through increased and partially reciprocal duties (along with a minimum tariff level). To hear the media tell it, such tariffs are the death knell for a beneficial global trading order and will immiserate billions. But such valedictories for the end of globalization advance a straw-man fiction about what is now supposedly lost: namely, that President Trump's policies contravene an agreed framework whereby goods, capital and labor move across national boundaries in a mostly unencumbered manner. If one believes in the merits of free trade and cross-border capital flows, it is essential not to confuse the ideal with the real. In truth, there have always been (often significant) friction and costs associated with such movements. Today's so-called free trade regime recalls Western support for Soviet communism, snarling 'real communism has never been tried' in defense of its myriad failures. Love it or hate it, what exists today is hardly real free trade. If what we have today isn't it, what does free trade closer to its Platonic ideal look like? This notion, that trade conditions are rarely wholly free or unfree, also confuses the media. The reality is that trading conditions sit uneasily along a continuum, and relatively free trade only occurs under certain conditions. These include (among others): Mutually agreed-upon rules for international commerce, consistently applied or at least generally observed, allowing for relatively open and reciprocal market access; Exemptions for strategic industries, a form of insurance for nations, insulating them from being caught short in a subsequent conflict with trading partners; Reliable cross-border supply chains, allowing for the disaggregation of production into its constituent parts (trading resource control for cost efficiency) and An ideologically unipolar historical moment, or a multi-polar world in which international trade largely occurs within the poles. These and other trade-friendly conditions were largely obtained in the decades leading up to the First World War, and in the 20 or so years following the end of the Cold War. While a world war is an obvious culprit ending an earlier era of globalization, what explains its current travails? A rules-based trading order can withstand certain restrictions (tariffs, regulations, quotas) — in fact, protecting strategic sectors demands some of them. But excessive use, along with outright cheating — subsidies, intellectual property theft and currency manipulation, as in the case of China — gives rise to a prisoner's dilemma with suboptimal outcomes. Similarly, the extended supply chains that proliferated over the last 30 years assumed the only national interest that mattered was economic advancement. Consider the terms made fashionable over the last three decades: 'a borderless world,' 'global citizens,' 'the end of history' and 'soft power.' The disaggregation of business models previously housed under a single corporate roof never anticipated revisionist challenges to Pax Americana, such as the retrograde gunboat diplomacy of China's Belt and Road Initiative, much less the rise of transnational terrorist organizations disrupting commerce and producing failed states. Moreover, the unipolar moment has ended. As China, under the rule of the Communist Party, displaced the Soviet Union as our primary geopolitical adversary, its admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001 conferred upon it a degree of economic leverage over the United States that Joseph Stalin could only have dreamed of. The return of history, with not only China but Russia, Turkey and others asserting spheres of influence and advancing parochial interests while embedded within a global economic system and multilateral institutions, further vitiates unfettered trade and capital movements. Failing to understand that globalization — the mutually beneficial interdependence and integration among nations, entailing a largely unrestricted flow of goods, capital, information and people — only flourishes under certain conditions, is only half of what the media and establishment elites get wrong. The other is the fetishization of globalism as an ideology. One can support globalization without being a globalist. Free trade and capital flows do not themselves comprise a belief system, but are rather a means to an end: actualizing individuals' aspirations and the nations that represent them. Free trade is the handmaiden of liberty, not vice versa. Reifying trade at the expense of other liberal values risks perverse outcomes; offshoring a nation's pharmaceutical production capacity to potentially belligerent nations is but one example. Another danger in globalism as an ideology is that of falling prey to historical determinism. Seeing deepening global integration as inevitable presents several risks. Believing it impervious threatens underinvestment in its sustenance (see the collapse of the WTO's Doha Round); competing objectives such as national self-determination and defense of borders may also be subordinated to globalism's tenets, destabilizing the very nations seeking to benefit from globalization. The proposed Trump tariff regime is not the full-throated attack on a functioning trading order critics make it out to be. To acknowledge this is not to defend blindly the administration's policies. Tariffs have their place as leverage against trading counterparties with onerous trade restrictions of their own. They are also useful to support strategic sectors in an increasingly dangerous world. What tariffs won't do is revive a rust-belt economy, which isn't coming back. Comparative advantage, alas, remains undefeated. Nor should tariffs be sold to the public as a governmental revenue-generator while incumbent income, sales and other tax regimes remain firmly in place. Globalization improves lives and should be promoted. Free trade and capital movements have consistently shown themselves, when the requisite conditions are present, to be mutually beneficial. How these benefits are distributed and whether the unchecked movement of people across borders is similarly beneficial are more complex matters. But the promotion of globalism as an inviolate creed, either for its own sake or as a counterpoint to 'America First' policies, fails to appreciate that globalization cannot be summoned by magical thinking and that it is the servant of liberty, not its master. Richard J. Shinder is the founder and managing partner of Theatine Partners, a financial consultancy. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store