Adam Aron, AMC's Chief Executive Officer and President, will kick things off this morning, followed by Chief Financial Officer Craig Ramsey, Chief Content Programming Officer Elizabeth Frank, Chief Marketing Officer Stephen Colanero, and President of AMC Europe, Mark Way. Craig will wrap up our formal remarks. Then we will have a question-and-answer session. We ask that you hold your questions until the Q&A session begins. We will be taking questions from both attendees and those on the webcast. For those attending, please wait for the microphone before you ask your question. If you're on the webcast and wish to ask a question, please email your question to investorrelations@amctheaters.com. We will select several to pose to the presenters. Our presentation this morning may contain forward-looking statements which are based on expectations and are subject to uncertainty and changes in the circumstances.
Actual results and other financial conditions may differ materially from what we are presenting today. The slide you are now seeing gives you information about some of the risks regarding those forward-looking statements, as well as where to go to get more information about risk factors. That wraps up the housekeeping issues. Let's get started. On behalf of all of us, thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedules to join us today to learn more about AMC.
At AMC, we like to live our life with movie quotes. I've always wanted to do this. "Good morning, Vietnam!" Anyway, good morning, one and all. Welcome today. We're thrilled you're with us. We're going to have an important conversation about where AMC is and where AMC is going. Whether you're here with us in New York or joining us from afar via live stream or reviewing this presentation after the fact, we generally appreciate your taking time out of your day to be with us, and especially as well, your willingness to spend some real time thinking in detail about the strategies and prospects ahead for AMC Entertainment. As you know, I'm Adam Aron, Chief Executive Officer of AMC, having served in my role since January 4, 2016.
In addition to John Merriwether, our Head of IR, we're all joined today by four of my AMC colleagues, all of whom are members of our senior leadership team. Honestly, I couldn't be more proud of the depth and breadth. Thank you. Bingo. The depth and breadth. Good job. If I do that again, you just come right back up and change it for me. The depth and breadth of the expertise, dedication, work ethic, and desire to achieve and innovate within AMC Senior Management Group. A view I hope that you'll share after you get more exposure to some of these key leaders of our company. Of course, with me today, someone many of you know well, is Craig Ramsey, AMC's longstanding Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, a CPA.
Craig has been CFO of AMC for more than 20 years, one of my closest colleagues and advisors. In addition to skillfully managing all the many finance and IT activities of our company, importantly, Craig knows where every body is buried at AMC and where most of the treasure chest of opportunity can be found. Stephen Colanero is our Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of AMC. A Wharton MBA, Stephen has considerable experience in thinking about how best to market movies, having previously served as head of marketing of Blockbuster Video back in its heyday when it was roaring hot, and for the past 10 years, having served as AMC's CMO. Stephen's been the driving force behind so many of our industry-leading efforts in customer engagement and in conceiving so much of our product offerings.
Elizabeth Frank is Executive Vice President of Global Programming and our Chief Content Officer, a job that's very important in a movie theater company, because Lord knows we have a lot of content. A Harvard MBA, Elizabeth was previously a partner at McKinsey & Company for almost a decade and served as well as Vice President of Corporate Strategic Planning at Time Warner. She joined AMC nine years ago in a strategic planning role at AMC, and some seven years ago, got promoted to become our head of programming and content, responsible for all of AMC's movie studio relationships, as well as I would mention the relationships, the strength and nature of which I think are a real competitive advantage for AMC because we've built such a close relationship with literally all of the major studios in Hollywood.
In addition to the studio relationships, of course, Elizabeth is in charge of programming all the content that each year goes on our many thousands of screens. Watched by our literally hundreds of millions of movie guests. Finally, Mark Way, Managing Director of the ODEON Cinemas Group and President of AMC Europe, who came in from London to be with you today. A graduate of Oxford, Mark holds an ACA, the British equivalent of a CPA, and spent his formative years in a long career at Hilton Hotels, based mostly in London, and ultimately rising to the post of Senior Vice President of Global Finance until about five years ago, when he joined ODEON as its CFO.
We first met him during our acquisition of ODEON, and were so impressed with Mark that immediately upon our consummating the acquisition, we put him in charge of all of our efforts in Europe. You could say that we were so impressed with you, Mark, that we blew through $1 billion to convince you to join AMC. We're here today to discuss AMC's market-leading position and the strategies we're implementing to drive financial results and to move our company forward. We hope today to give you a framework to better understand our thinking as to what we are doing, where we're headed, and why. We also will give you some multi-year targets for our financial strategies and financial results as to what we believe this company is capable of generating and what we are working tirelessly to deliver.
We also look forward to hearing from you and to fielding your questions. As a preface to the day, we're not going to cover two particular subjects in any detail. We are not planning to cover today the changes to any modeling of AMC as a result of the new lease accounting rules which went into effect on January 1. Given the complexity of the subject, we have already scheduled a call on this topic, and this topic solely, for next Wednesday, April 24, at 4:15 Eastern Time, where we will exhaustively walk you through all the particulars. What we will say today is to remind you that while this accounting change will alter the presentation of certain items on our income statement and balance sheet, these are all changes and charges that are non-cash. Non-cash.
They have no impact on our underlying business, our operations, and the actual cash we have been and will be generating going forward. Looking backward and going forward, as the rules permit and for as long as we prudently can, we intend to give investors some kind of pro forma comparisons so you and other investors can fully understand our historic and future financial results and market valuations. We will not be announcing first quarter financial results because in just a couple of weeks in early May, we will be doing our normal quarterly earnings announcement and quarterly conference call. We'll not be saying anything today that could be construed to be pre-announcing first quarter 2019 results.
Having said that, industry box office data on a week-to-week basis is readily available publicly, and if you follow our industry closely or even not so closely, all along, given the calendar of has gotten off to an enormously were both quite successful. So far in 2019, we have not, as of yet, had an opening of a "Beauty and the Beast" like we had in March of 2017, or a "Black Panther" like we had in February of 2018. This is what we always knew. What we know is that when we look at the movie slate that's coming for the balance of this year, quarters two, three, and four, we continue to be astounded, and I picked that adjective carefully, by the appeal of so many movies that will be released within this year, 2019.
You've probably already heard that advanced bookings for "Avengers," which went on sale two weeks ago yesterday, that for "Avengers: Endgame" have shattered all previous records by a country mile, 50% larger than the advance bookings for any movie heretofore, and that was "Star Wars: The Force Awakens." I'm talking the U.S. numbers here. The bookings for "Avengers: Endgame" were so strong that they exceeded the bookings for "Avengers: Infinity War," the movie in the same series that came out a year earlier, "Black Panther," "Captain Marvel," and "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" combined. For the full year, we have every confidence not only in "Avengers: Endgame," but so many of the movies that will be coming out this year. It's our view that 2019 is going to be a huge year for the box office, both domestically and internationally.
We expect the year will build momentum as we go, leading to a particularly strong last trimester, September to December 2019. It is too early to know for sure, but this could very well be the first year in history that the domestic industry box office ever crosses $12 billion. That in turn means that for full year 2019, AMC should be able to deliver adjusted EBITDA meaningfully greater than that of 2018, which in itself was a record year for us, but that that adjusted EBITDA is likely to be back-end loaded in the year. The conclusion of all this is that in thinking about people's expectations, we find that some are considerably overstating probable first quarter results and probable first quarter performance, but those same people are also considerably underestimating probable fourth quarter performance and probable fourth quarter results.
We have previously said, as recently as our fourth quarter conference call and quarterly earnings, that there are natural fluctuations in the box office between quarters within a year, resulting solely from the timing of slate releases from week to week and month to month and quarter to quarter. That is why, as we manage the business, we tend to focus much more on yearly performance in total particular quarter individually, and we would encourage you to do so as well. In short, while 2019 will be starting out very slowly, it gives every sign that this will be an incredible year, and we could not be more bullish or more optimistic about the performance of our industry and the performance of our company for the full year 2019, back-end loaded though it may be.
With that preamble out of the way, let us now take a deep dive into AMC, our place in the sun, our strategies underway, and our prospects ahead. I would like to start out by saying that there are managed company should have top of mind and which are all high priorities for AMC. To wisely drive long-term adjusted EBITDA and adjusted free cash a strong, sustainable, and flexible balance sheet. In our case, having consciously levered up over the past 36 months to opportunistically make major acquisitions and to reinvest in our business, capturing particularly compelling high ROI returns, that desire for a prudent capital structure now requires that AMC de-leverage our balance sheet to get back down to and to conform with our medium to long-term target levels of leverage.
Third, for any company and us, is to evaluate how to return capital. Doing all three of these things well is what creates long-term value for share internally conflicting and compete with each other for the allocation of capital. As we look at AMC, I think as you would look at AMC, over the past seven years, we have heavily invested in growth, both through acquisition and internal reinvestment. In the past year and a half, by contrast, we returned significant monies to shareholders, both through our rich dividends, common and special, and substantial stock buybacks. Looking ahead to the next three years and then beyond. Clearly, our focus has shifted to deleveraging and strengthening our balance sheet.
We get there in part as our CapEx investments return to more normalized levels, as we have. This has the added benefit of causing significant increases to adjusted free cash flow, the recognition and acknowledgment of that undoubtedly being welcome news for investors. Thanks to past investment in growth, look at the company that AMC has built. Built over 100 years of history and built over the last three years of substantial change and transformation. AMC has become the biggest company in our industry on a global basis, giving us the greatest opportunity to benefit from all aspects of having commanding scale advantages. AMC now has just slightly more than 1,000 theaters in 15 countries with 11,000 screens. No one in our industry comes close to 1,000 theaters or 11,000 screens. We're the number one operator in the U.S. We're the number one operator in Europe.
We're the number one operator on the planet. Within the U.S., we are number one or two in 21 of the 25 largest cities and metropolitan areas in this country. In Europe, we're number one or two the Middle East. Three-quarters of AMC can be found. More than half the U.S. population lives within 10 mi of an AMC theater. To technology, our commitment to customer engagement, and our commitment to world-class marketing, we've also built the largest customer database of avid moviegoers by anyone on this earth, not just of cinema operators, but anyone in the field of entertainment. That database is rich with information, not only contact information and demographic information, but specific purchase histories of what movies people have seen in theaters in recent years. Movie by movie, title by title. It gives us and targeted efficiently in our engagement efforts. We're a big shop.
We sold almost 360 million tickets last year. We've created the world's largest loyalty programs, specifically here in the U.S., our AMC Stubs program with 19 million U.S. double the U.S. average. That means our database has detailed moviegoing information about just right around 50 million avid moviegoers in the U.S. If that's not enough, we have another 6 million members in Europe in our loyalty programs across the pond. This gives us unique data into guest preferences, guest behavior, and gives us an incredible opportunity to market films to people so they come back to our theaters again and again and again. Take these two items together, scale advantages and database advantages. The largest operator of cinemas, the biggest number of customer relationships. Results.
Add to that a massive commitment of executive time. You'll see that AMC legitimately to be the strongest, best, and most imaginative partnerships possible with literally all the major studios and makers of film, especially in Hollywood. In the unprompted written words of one true studio luminary, a giant who I really shouldn't name by name, but if you knew the name, you'd really be impressed, just in the past week, wrote me to say, and quote, "Exclamation point." Close up. That's typical of all our relationships in Hollywood. The next slide eight. It shows you what we call the AMC platform. Self-reinforcing nature of so many of our various strategies at AMC. Economies of scale advantages.
Different company now when contrasted against ourselves in an earlier incarnation, not to mention when compared to so many in our industry, especially our smaller competitors who feel like old-fashioned and out-of-date operators of movie theaters. Instead, at AMC, we've transformed ourselves into being the experiential leader, the engagement leader. All of this enabling AMC to deliver the ultimate moviegoing experience on our hundreds of millions of customer visits each year. So much so, in fact, that we believe AMC already is far down the road of being the quintessential 21st century provider of out-of-home entertainment. What's more, our passion and penchant for innovation will drive us down this road even faster in the months and years ahead, cementing our position as a 21st century player. What do we mean by all this?
In a seamless, frictionless manner, AMC is serving our guests end to end, from before they get to our theaters, through to their consuming and enjoying film content at our theater locations, and then being back with them again when they're home. In so doing, we do all these things. One, leveraging data and modern technology interfaces to increase patronage and increase guest satisfaction. Two, communicating often and in a highly personalized and targeting manner to our guests. Three, introducing business model innovations related to loyalty and subscription to increase our guest brand stickiness. Four, charging premium prices when we can and offering bargains when we should. Five, offering the best possible but nonetheless affordable theatrical experiences, basically differentiating AMC by our offering a modicum of luxury to the masses. Let's look at the relationships we're building with our U.S. guests through the AMC platform.
Visually, I want you to start at that top center box, the one with the big AMC Stubs logo, our loyalty program. As previously mentioned, we now have a rich, sophisticated consumer database of 19 million households, about 50 million people, all members of our rapidly growing frequent moviegoer loyalty program. Growing, I might add, at the rate of about a half a million members a month. Our database, as I've said before, lets us know who these members are, what makes them tick, what movies they've seen, and that allows us to engage with them in significant numbers of communications in a targeted way with digital outreach, which catalyzes meaningful demand and engagement through email, text, our website, and our mobile smartphone apps.
Especially amongst our most avid moviegoers, our A-List members, those people who are committed to spend about $250 a year with us in movie ticket admissions through their monthly subscription fees on an annualized basis. All these people can and do book their tickets with us in advance online in significantly increasing numbers. More than 50% of our guests are now buying their tickets online in advance through the web, the smartphone app, or other channels of distribution. We're in the process right now of rolling out a new initiative for these people, allowing them not only to book their tickets in advance online, but allowing them to pre-order their food and beverage wants in advance online. There's real guest convenience here because this allows them to reduce the time they spend waiting in the theater.
We promise that through an express pickup location, their food order will be ready for them when they get to the theater, or alternatively, in many of our theaters, for a small, modest service charge will actually deliver their F&B to their seat at a pre-scheduled time of their choosing. It's not just any old concession stand fare that AMC is now delivering. Of course, at our AMC Dine-In theaters, we're offering full casual restaurant menus. Even at the 80%, 90% of our theaters that are just concession stand theaters, a major operator of feature film. Let's turn to drink. I personally counted more than 180 different soft drink flavor choices coming out of our Coke Freestyle machines, which are now installed at 100% of our U.S. theaters. We're the only large chain to offer Coca-Cola Freestyle.
Should you like your drinks a tad harder, we have full alcoholic bars at more than half of our theaters in the AMC and AMC Dine-In brands, and they are in place at the vast majority of our high-traffic theaters. As the movie begins, guests can stretch out, enjoy our signature recliner seats from the company AMC, that has more recliner-equipped theaters than anyone else. To remove anxiety from the process of securing a good seat location, we started introducing reserved seating several years back, We are in the process right now of another significant enhancement for AMC guests, introducing reserved seating at literally all of our AMC branded and all of our AMC Dine-In branded theaters in the United States this year, continuing the theme of having so many competitive advantages at AMC.
AMC doesn't just lead the way with more interesting food choices or drink choices or better seats. We're also leading the way in sight and sound technology. We are the largest IMAX operator in North America, with almost 50% of all IMAX locations on this continent being just at AMC Theatres. We are the sole operator of Dolby Cinema across the United States and already have about 130 Dolby Cinema locations installed throughout the country to great critical acclaim. We also have a proprietary premium large format brand called Prime, which Stephen Colanero will talk a little bit more about when he gets up at the podium. Put all this together, more and more guests are becoming brand loyal to AMC because of all of these reasons.
That gives us more members, that gives us more customer relationships, that gives us more data, The cycle repeats, fully circular than it is. In summary, personalizable data drives increased engagement, resulting in higher attendance, which supports investments to create a guest-pleasing end-to-end experience, which in turn drives more Stubs members, That in turn drives even more data. This illustrates the flywheel effect that gets us excited about the power and potential of the AMC platform. AMC's investments in innovation and growth all have been designed realizing that the circular, interconnected nature and self-fulfilling success of our implementing all of these strategies. The more we sow, the more we reap. The more we do, the faster the flywheel spins.
That's why the growth in AMC Stubs membership and A-List membership, the growth in website and smartphone app visits, the growth in online ticketing have all been so robust in the past few years, and why attendance growth for AMC in 2018 considerably outpaced our industry. In short, AMC has been investing in initiatives that are making us a digital and engagement leader, in initiatives upgrading and enhancing our theaters that make us the experiential leader, and in initiatives expanding our footprint in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East that increase our scale, delivering our high-quality movie-going experiences to more consumers in more places and amplifying the network effect that exists between a larger network of better theaters and our guests.
Before going deeper still in our discussion today, I'd like to specifically call out two topics because we know that they've been areas of particular interest among investors throughout the past year: A-List and leverage. These two matters have sometimes caused apprehension about AMC and what we believe are potential misperceptions of the bright prospects ahead for our company. I'd like to talk about both in a little detail. Relatively new A-List. A little more than nine months ago. When we launched A-List, we got on the phone immediately with investors to brief you all, and on each of our quarterly conference calls since, we've tried to be particularly transparent with you about what we've seen in the program's early months.
We clearly articulated that we thought we were off to a superb start for A-List, we've certainly put forward a case with you that our company has significant experience and expertise in this area, that at the highest levels of our company, we've been very closely monitoring A-List metric, after metric, after metric on literally a daily basis. Some AMC observers have been nervous about A-List, given, one, the newness of the program. two, the fully anticipated and disclosed investment spend required up front as the heaviest users logically would come on board A-List first. three, the likely conclusion that margin profitability of the program would come if the number of incremental visits grew to the right levels, if their ancillary spending in F&B showed up, and if they brought along guests with them.
The fourth reason of concern is the fact that others in this space flamed out so spectacularly. Do we ever have good news for you today. Stephen Colanero is going to provide you with much more information in a few minutes on A-List. Here's the headline. What a smashing success AMC has in A-List, period. No caveats, no equivocations. Here are six key points about A-List. One, membership continues to grow steadily and way ahead of our expectations. You'll recall that we hit our one-year membership goal in only four and a half months. Even at higher prices that are double what others are charging, A-Listers like the value that we offer and the flexibility and ease of use we designed in as core elements of our program.
As of this morning, we are right around 757,000 A-List subscribers, and that statistic is net of membership churn, and that membership number continues to grow. Two, theater visits among these memberships is highly incremental. On average, more than tripling the AMC theater visits are seeing a considerable increase in full revenue considerably more each month. Three, frequency of theater visits has settled in nicely to a sweet spot, not too hot and not too cold, where our guests, AMC, and our studio partners all can win. Average visits per month by A-List members in the now completed first quarter of 2019 was 2.6x, right where we wanted it to be. Point four, on January 16th of this year, we successfully introduced an average 13% price increase in the monthly subscription cost to new members of A-List without taking any meaningful flak.
That price increase will roll out through the entire membership on the one-year anniversary of each individual member's enrollment date. Five, A-List, just nine months old, already is producing approximately $200 million of annual recurring subscription fee revenues and approximately $400 price and their F&B purchases. That's at the current membership levels. Six, as we said on the last quarterly call, be profitable for AMC in 2019, a full year ahead of schedule. More impressive, we originally thought that the program would drive $15 million-$25 million in incremental EBITDA for 1 million members starting in the year 2020. We now are increasingly confident that by the end of 2019, a year earlier, the incremental run rate EBITDA will actually be much more like $3 per member per month. That's $36 per member per year. That would be $36 million incrementally per million members. This program is a hit.
It's successful. We're doing great, ahead of expectations, and we are very much committed to continuing to reap the rewards of having gotten out in front as the industry leader and first mover in this area amongst the theater operators. A-List is driving attendance for AMC. A-List is locking in brand loyalty for AMC. A-List is profitable for AMC. We have a winner on our hands, no caveats, no equivocations. This is great news for us. Let's turn to leverage. As for our leverage levels, on our last quarterly call, for the first time ever, we gave you multiple year CapEx forecasts. We continue to have highly attractive internal investment opportunities that exceed our 25% hurdle returns.
For the benefit of the shareholders of our company, we'll continue to deploy capital to help spur our growth, especially looking at high return projects in Europe and the Middle East, where the expected return parameters appear to be incredibly encouraging. Given that we are coming to a natural conclusion of our investment strategies domestically here in the United States, over a three to five-year period from now, we see CapEx coming down. We see free cash flow going up and our leverage levels coming down markedly. This is now a very high priority for us. In the interim, in just the past several weeks, we were able to successfully refinance $2 billion of our debt for seven years, as well as to extend the life of our undrawn revolving credit line. As a result, AMC has no debt maturities over the next five years.
This certainly gives us staying power and peace of mind. As I end this executive summary of our presentation today, we'd like to share with you how we think of AMC and what we think AMC is capable of delivering as we look ahead to the medium term and the long term. Since these guidelines are those that we are working very hard to achieve and deliver, let's make some news today by discussing these targets with you some week, this month, or even potentially this year, but these are the targets we're setting for AMC over the medium to long term. We encourage you to write these goals down and to hold us to delivering on them.
While there may be an occasional fluctuation in the box office in a particular quarter, possibly even in a particular year, over a multiple year timeframe, we believe AMC is perfectly capable of posting a CAGR in revenue growth of 3%-5% per annum, even in what some people think is a mature industry. With the operating leverage that's inherent in our business as a high fixed cost, low variable cost operation. With growing revenues, we also believe we can deliver adjusted EBITDA margins of 17%-19%, delivering up to a 200 basis points margin expansion. As we do so, higher revenues, higher margins, we would expect to create substantial equity value for AMC shareholders.
Meanwhile, as previously discussed, we think that CapEx will fall from the $500 million level of two years ago and that our CapEx spend will come down to a range of about $250 million-$300 million . About $150 million of that is for maintenance CapEx, which still leaves us $100 million-$150 million annually to put into growth initiatives available to us at that time. All this taken together means that within three years, we ought to be able to lower our leverage level to a range of 3.5x-4.5x , which is considerably below our current 5.5x net leverage. Beyond that time frame, beyond 36 months, we believe that we should continue to work AMC's leverage level down to a target goal of 3x EBITDA to net debt.
Over the next 36 months, you will see us make significant progress in de-leveraging, putting us on the path to hit these various targets. This will be comforting to many, especially in combination with our just having successfully pushed out all of our near-term maturities. I'm going to reinforce just a few more points before handing the floor to my colleagues. You can't really think about AMC without reminding yourself that we have become the clear and undisputed leader in the world's cinema industry. AMC is the largest cinema operator in the U.S., the largest cinema operator in Europe, the largest cinema operator in the world, with more than 1,000 theaters, more than 11,000 screens, with some $5.5 billion in annual revenue, and more than 350 million admission tickets sold at our theaters annually.
To put that number of ticket sales in perspective, 350 million tickets, that's more than double the tickets sold for every home game of all the teams in Major League Baseball, of all the teams in the National Football League, of all the teams in the NHL, of all the teams in the NBA combined. AMC is number one or two in 21 of the 25 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. We're not only number one or two in 11 of the 14 countries we serve in Europe and the Middle East, we're also number one or two in three of the five largest economies in Europe and four of the six largest economies in Western Europe. We have almost a century of tradition and heritage under our belts.
Our 100th anniversary is next year in 2020. Yet, over the past few years, we've been reborn, adding the ODEON, Nordic, and Carmike circuits to what had been AMC, doubling our company in size and significantly expanding our geographic reach. While this next slide is subjective, and therefore open to argument, we also like to think that we're not only the biggest operator in the world, but that we're also the best. No one has invested in upgrading the overall quality of their theaters as has AMC over the past several years. No one else has seen the surge in popularity of our loyalty programs, our subscription programs, our web and smartphone portals, as has AMC, transforming AMC with world-class prowess in digital engagement. The numbers illustrate our transformation, whether through acquisition or organic growth.
Over the past decade, AMC's attendance is up 73%, AMC's revenue is up 139%, and AMC's adjusted EBITDA is up 150%. We've been able to raise ticket prices by 21%, even though at the same time, we've moved into low-price countries like commitment to more innovative food and beverage items has caused food and beverage revenue growth to soar, with food and beverage revenue per patron up 49%, and of course, the number of patrons being up 73%. You've already heard me talk our loyalty story. AMC Stubs, for example, is a program that did not exist 10 years ago. A-List was a program that did not exist one year ago. Just in the last three years, looking at Stubs, our membership has grown sevenfold, from about 2.5 million households 36 months ago to more than 19 million households today.
There are seven reasons to believe that AMC has a bright future. Craig, Elizabeth, Steven, and Mark are going to take you through this, but let me just point out that First, AMC is, as I just said, the number one theatrical exhibitor in the world. Two, theatrical exhibition is a stable and growing industry, has been for two decades, with attractive and enduring value proposition to consumers. Three, AMC is the industry leader in experiential and business model improvements with a proven track record of success. Four, we're building the AMC platform to deliver the best end-to-end movie-going experience, driving demand and driving spend. Five, there's substantial opportunity for us still to invest in high ROI initiatives and enhancements and footprint expansion. Six, we've demonstrated a history of revenue growth, EBITDA growth, free cash flow growth, which we expect will continue.
Seven, we're absolutely committed to a sustainable but flexible capital structure, supported by a disciplined approach to capital allocation and conforming to the target levels of leverage that we have set for ourselves. Thank you for listening. It's now my pleasure to bring Craig up and take the mic.
Thank you, Adam, and good morning, everyone. As he said, we're going to drill down a little bit on the seven key investment highlights for you starting now. In a business where scale is important, I think this slide kind of says it all. AMC is the largest exhibitor in the world. We're currently the number one operator in the U.S., number one and two in 12 of the 15 countries where we operate globally. AMC today is the result of both organic growth and three major acquisitions, the combination of which has created enhanced scale and also a diversification of our revenue base that's taken place over time. As you recall, we acquired three circuits during the 2016-2017 period. We acquired Domestic and Nordic, which resulted in the largest exhibitor in the world. We're also a leader in the customer experience for moviegoing.
We'll take you through a lot of that, a lot of the details around that later. Consistent with our strong growth historically, we continue to execute against a long runway of organic growth opportunities, including the AMC platform that Adam introduced and reviewed with you today, which we'll also take a look at in more detail going forward. This demonstrates our global footprint. Again, we hold the number one and two position in 21 of the top 25 U.S. markets in the U.S. By the way, those happen to be pretty important markets to our studio partners for the display of their product. We also hold the number one and two position in 11 of the 14 countries we operate in Europe, and then again, as well in the Middle East. Because of our number one position globally, we benefit from significant scale. There we go.
Significant scale, particularly in three areas. First being the breadth of our reach. For example, Adam touched on this earlier, in the U.S., our theaters are easily accessible by the majority of Americans, with 50% of the U.S. population living within a 10 mi radius of an AMC theater. In Europe, we operate as the number one or two exhibitor in three of the largest European economies. Second is economies of scale. We are the largest global procurer of theatrical films, food and beverage items sold in our concession stands, and lighting and theater supplies utilized in our theaters. As the biggest player, we also happen to be driving the most revenue dollars for our partners. Third is the network effect that Adam talked about as well, and we'll spend more time discussing this a little later in our presentation.
At a high level, our AMC Stubs membership base is the core of our transformation to a more personalized moviegoing experience powered by data analytics, which increases engagement. The more AMC Stubs members, the more data, the more engagement, and hence the positive feedback loop. Together, these factors make AMC the most valuable ecosystem partner for our studios, our vendors, our suppliers, our advertisers, and importantly, our landlords. I'm going to change the topic and talk about our industry a little bit. To do so, I'd like to introduce our Chief Content and Programming Officer, Elizabeth Frank.
Thank you, Craig. Theatrical exhibition is a stable and growing industry with 20 years, actually far more than 20 years, of steady growth. As you can see from this chart, the domestic box office continues to set a new record about every year and a half. Remarkably, six years. Theatrical industry stability is noteworthy because while these box office records have been broken, technology disruption has dramatically reshaped the home entertainment marketplace. Through widespread consumer adoption of DVD players in the early 2000s, and more recently, the rapid growth of streaming video services. The domestic box office has averaged 2.5% compound annual growth. It's equally noteworthy that the domestic box office grows through times of economic recession. In the periods 2001, 2002, and also 2008, 2009, U.S. and Canadian consumers increased their spending on movie tickets.
The greatest source of our industry stability is a consistent stream of exciting new movies marketed very broadly to consumers across our markets. Every Friday, we present new movies, plus a variety of the most popular films from prior weeks. In 2018, Hollywood studios released over 250 movies that generated $1 million or more at the box office. Of those, about 120 generated more than $10 million at the domestic box office. Hollywood brings the widest range of movies, stories to our big screens, from superheroes to comedies, from shoot 'em up actions to tear-jerking romances, animated family films to thought-provoking dramas. We aim to serve, as both Adam and Craig have described, the broadest of audiences across North America and across Europe. Hollywood brings us films, compelling stories that attract those audiences into our theaters. We have something to play for everyone.
Increasingly, Hollywood's incorporating diversity into its movies in a way that reflects each of our markets' broad movie-going audience and gives them the opportunity to see their stories on the big screen with their friends and their family. This creative content breadth makes our industry strong and stable for many years. As Adam said, it does bring variability week-to-week and month-to-month. Some films become must-see and others fail to reach their full audience. One quarter's success becomes the next quarter's tough comp. Every single Friday, we have the opportunity to open new movies that attract a broader, new audience and to return the box office growth back to its pace.
For over 20 years and thousands and thousands of movies, despite expanded content available to consumers on ever larger televisions and ever more enhanced mobile devices, consumer spending in movie theaters has continued to grow. Sorry about that. The same is true internationally, as we'll get back to this slide in a second. The same is true internationally, where the box office has displayed long growth with records over 13 of the past 14 years. Overall, industry growth outside the U.S. has outpaced the North American growth as cinemas have continued to open in many markets, making movie-going accessible for more consumers. Hollywood blockbusters that we've talked about making such an important difference in North America, draw huge audiences in markets around the world, especially family films.
In addition to this Hollywood fare, locally produced movies in many, many markets generate considerable box office and continue to bring creative content breadth to each of our markets in a way that keeps our product fresh and our industry strong. Importantly, as Adam described, movie-going has an extremely attractive and enduring value proposition as affordable out-of-home entertainment. The value of movie-going has endured for decades. The average movie ticket price has increased an average of 2.6% a year in North America. As an industry, as Adam described, we've been earning that higher price through premium formats and localized increases, modest increases in pricing where local demand is strong. At the same time, we as an industry have ensured that movie-going has remained affordable for the most price-sensitive of consumers by having special pricing for some groups like children.
It's worth pausing for a minute and thinking about the entertainment experience of movie-going. The experience that consumers are buying from us is two hours or so in a theater, out of their home, with friends and family, completely immersed in an auditorium like this with big sight and loud sound, without their devices. It's a date night for some. It's an evening out with friends for others. It's a Sunday family outing, which often is a reward to the kids for some good behavior that the parents needed to extract out of them earlier in the week. They have a very wide variety of reasons they come to the theaters to be entertained, brought in by the latest films and brought back again and again with the widest offering that we have.
It goes without saying that the streaming services deliver a very different in the home and on the go. The enduring value proposition that has enabled theatrical movie-going to grow for over 20 years and decades before that has succeeded in spite of streaming services growing dramatically and now reaching levels of maturation. We're confident that this trend, the stability of the theatrical business, will continue into the future. The most common misconception about the movie theater business is that attendance has been steadily declining for many, many years, and it's simply not true, as you can see from the facts on this chart. While North American theater attendance did decline in the early 2000s, it stabilized many years ago, after 2011, as you can see on the chart.
AMC played an outsized role in the stabilization of industry attendance through the investments that Adam and Craig described in theater experiences and also in marketing. In 2018, as Adam described, AMC's attendance growth per screen outpaced the industry by 340 basis points. We envision that continuing in the future. It's hard not to be excited about the fundamentals of consumer demand for moviegoing. This most recent survey that you can see on this chart was conducted by the Motion Picture Association of America, shows that 75% of Americans surveyed described having gone to see a movie in the past 12 months. For the younger demographic, on the other side of the screen, that participation rate was significantly higher, over 90%. That younger demographic, that age 12 to 24 cohort, went to see the movies, as they report, over five times in the past 12 months.
They, in fact, were more avid moviegoers, both in participation rates and in frequency, than older generations, in spite of our concern that and their YouTube and their Snapchat to come see what's considered more old-fashioned entertainment. For people who've been in a theater recently, seeing the biggest, exciting new movies and also experiencing all the investments we've put in place, know that there's nothing old-fashioned about what we provide. Equally exciting to these demographics are research that AMC conducts week in and week out with the many, many members of our loyalty program, showing that moviegoers want to go to the movies more than they're going today. There's an opportunity for us in that. On many Fridays, we'll survey a group of moviegoers about their upcoming weekend plans. What movies are they aware of? What are they interested in? What are they planning to see?
For that group that has specific moviegoing plans, we go back on the Monday by email and ask them what they did over the weekend. We know, actually, many of them were in the theater or not based on the robust databases we have. We ask them, "Did you make it to the theater or not, and why?" The vast majority of people, when we survey them, either say, "Yes, I went to the movie," or almost in equal parts, "Ugh, I meant to go to the movie. I wanted to go see that movie. My friend saw the movie.
I'm going to get there, but I missed it." That opportunity of converting that interest and excitement about a movie into attendance through much of the AMC platform that Adam highlighted and Steven will describe in much more detail, is the core of our partnership with Hollywood Studios, the opportunity for growth in the industry, and the investment thesis behind the AMC platform. You might be asking yourself, though, whether that demand for movies, that want-to-see interest that we see on a Friday, is going to be satisfied by video streaming. The experience that we're delivering in research that basically proved out what we already know, what we commonly believe, movie lovers love movies. Rather than having one platform shift movie lovers from [inaudible] and Young shows that our most frequent moviegoers, on average, that's 11 hours a week.
You can see a distribution of their streaming use hours per week and spend more often, more content than the infrequent moviegoers who report going to the theater once or twice a year. Given this research and so many other studies that have proven out this very same point, it's no surprise that Disney and Warner Bros. and Universal all see their soon-to-be-launched video streaming services as great with them. Distribution businesses require compelling content to attract consumer spending and attention, and the most attractive content generates disproportionate financial returns. The most valuable content is often, by definition, scarce, expensive to produce, and capable of creating enduring brand value.
Over 1 million hours of new video content are available to consumers each year in the U.S., ranging from user-generated content on video share sites, low-budget reality television, traditional TV sitcoms, or premium TV series, and at the very top of that value chain, theatrical movies. More narrowly, movies run across a similar segment, from homemade movies, made-for-TV movies, straight-to-video movies, and again, at the top, on a totally different league, feature films that are promoted and distributed to theaters. While we believe strongly that content is king, we also appreciate the role that distribution plays as kingmaker. Theatrical distribution in particular can differentiate movies. It can elevate them and put them front and center culturally. Last month at CinemaCon, our annual trade show, Universal Studios shared a testimonial video of industry-leading filmmakers seeing movies with others in theaters.
Presented louder and larger than life, in the dark with no communications devices and hearing, sometimes singing along. Theatrical movies create cultural moments where it seems that everyone we know is asking, "Have you seen it yet?" Theatrical distribution launches popular and profitable brand franchises, and that's the core of the partnership that Adam described between exhibition, AMC in particular, and Hollywood. Tentpole films built exclusively on theatrical distribution and the mass marketing that supports it create enduring brand value. Franchise films like "Despicable Me" and "Fast & Furious" launch movie sequels and spinoffs, licensed merchandise, theme park rides, video games, online properties and TV shows, and so much more. These theatrical films, these franchises, are also playing out on a global basis with synchronized theatrical releases in markets around the world, followed by a combination of both global brand extension and localized brand extension.
As Hollywood studios seek to launch and maximize very profitable entertainment brand franchises, theatrical distribution is key, and exhibitors are their most critical partners. As you know, as Adam has said, the box office has never been stronger. In 2018, the North American box office set a record with $11.9 billion in box office, representing 7% year-on-year growth, and the global box office hit a new record as well at $41.1 billion. That year featured many blockbusters, including superhero fan favorites like "Black Panther" and "Deadpool" and "Venom" and "Ant-Man and the Wasp" and "Aquaman".
At the same time, we had films that played super broad to a family audience with "Incredibles 2" and "Grinch." We had movies that surprised, that drew in huge audiences, "A Star Is Born," "Bohemian Rhapsody," and "Mamma Mia!", captivating adult audiences with original takes on character-driven stories and obviously music that captured everyone's attention. No one film, though, drove the record-setting in 2018. In fact, across the full year, the largest box office growth was in movies that in aggregate in North America generated between $50 million and $100 million.
This combination of programming breadth, plus the blockbusters that play to the broadest audience, generates for us the opportunity to bring in infrequent moviegoers who want to be in that big cultural moment and feel compelled to join their friends and family in that discussion, as well as the very most avid moviegoers who are looking to see what's new playing this weekend. That is the strength that we see in the box office going forward. Adam mentioned the strong start to 2019, borne out largely by the success of Q1 in 2018 that had the monster hit "Black Panther" and the tremendous holdover success of "Jumanji" that had been a holiday 2017 title. In fact, 80% of our Q1 difference between 2019 and 2018 is driven by those two films, "Black Panther" and "Jumanji".
As we've said, though, every week brings an opportunity to launch new movies and attract a broader audience, and that has never been more true right now with "Avengers," which will open in eight days across the U.S. and around the world. As Adam highlighted, when we launched ticket sales a couple of weeks ago on April 2nd, fan demand literally broke the internet. We had more traffic and more ticket sales across our ticketing platforms and those of our partners than we'd ever seen for any film. Sales continue to ramp up in the time since April 2nd for this must-see film. To satisfy record-setting opening weekend demand, we've got a team in Kansas City that's been adding shows and helping theaters across the country to extend operating hours, serving moviegoers, in many cases, at showtimes around the clock.
Craig highlighted the operating leverage in our business model, and while this challenged our profitability in a slow Q1, you can imagine that same leverage working to our tremendous advantage as we extend operating hours for existing theaters with existing marketing programs and existing management teams. More broadly, 2019 looks to be a tremendous year. We believe that in spite of its slow start, we have the opportunity to set a new record in the industry, both in the U.S. and in international. We've talked about "Avengers: Endgame" releasing on April 26th and promising to future.
We had equal excitement coming out of Chicago earlier this month for Star Wars Celebration and the announcement that the next Star Wars that releases on December 20th will be called "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker." The internet. We have many people in the flywheel that Adam and Steven will describe telling us of their interest and making sure that we notice them as soon as tickets go on sale. That movie, opening on December 20th, will play well into 2020. Between those films, every single month has a big new title coming out. Godzilla in May, Men in Black in June, Spider-Man in July, Fast and Furious in August, It Chapter Two in September, Joker in October, Terminator: Dark Fate in November, Cats in December.
For those big films, there are also dozens of films of original stories that are coming to theaters by both Hollywood major studios and many independent studios and filmmakers that we've started to see and to promote to moviegoers, again, providing a diverse, a broad, and a film in many ways carries the strongest around the world. We will have a tremendous lineup for the year with Secret Life of Pets Two, Toy Story Four, Lion King, Angry Birds Two, Frozen Two, and Jumanji Two coming in June, July, August, November, and December of 2019. These six franchises with proven characters and established fan bases, the last films for each of those titles in the North American box office totaled $1.7 billion.
For us, the opportunity that we see to have those proven properties presented and promoted to consumers, and then in turn expose them to all kinds of other films that we're going to be playing, presents a unique and exciting opportunity for 2019 and puts us on super strong ground with a lot of momentum headed into 2020. We really couldn't be more confident about the box office going forward. With that, I'd like to turn it over to Stephen Colanero, our Chief Marketing Officer, to talk about how the AMC platform aims to convert that industry opportunity into AMC business.
Good morning, everyone. Yes, let's shift gears back from the global industry, which is in very good shape for 2019, and talk specifically about AMC, and particularly domestically with some of the things that we're talking about with the platform that we've built. In addition to being the largest exhibitor, we are also committed to delivering the best movie-going experience to our consumers. Over the last five to six years, we've invested over $1.7 billion in our recliner upgrades, in our premium format large screens, and enhanced food and beverage options. These investments have paid big dividends with respect to our moviegoing for our guests. We started early on these investments, we've invested the most, and we are close to saturation, as Adam mentioned before, which is why we're expecting the capital expense to moderate over the coming years.
Additionally, we've continued to innovate in terms of how we engage with our consumers. We relaunched our AMC Stubs program in 2016, coming off of a base of 2.5 million AMC Stubs members, growing to our current member base of 19 million member households, easily going to be getting to 20 million in a not too distant future. As Adam mentioned, back in June of last year, we launched AMC Stubs A-List, and that has quickly become a success, reaching 750,000 members much quicker than we ever anticipated. As a reminder, our initial goal was to get to 500,000 by June of this coming year, and we're already at over 750,000 now. All of this investment has led to industry-leading theater productivity, where we're afforded the opportunity to have the highest average ticket price in the industry.
Despite that, we're still able to drive the highest attendance per screen growth 2018 year-over-year to the prior year, where the industry grew 3.5% in 2018 and AMC was able to grow 6.9%. That's because of the strength of the foundation we've built with those investments that we've made in the actual theater experience and now beyond. Let's take a step back in time, and we don't have to go back 99 years to the birth of AMC. We can just go back just literally 10 years ago. It may seem a very long time ago, but it was only about 10 years ago where the movie-going experience was very different than it is today.
We relied on people to see advertising, whether it was on a billboard or more likely in a newspaper, to see what movies were playing and what show times were available at different theaters. From that, we would hope they were motivated enough to come to the theater, where they would need to stand in line to buy tickets and then get into another line to buy popcorn and soda, and usually just popcorn and soda, maybe a little bit of Milk Duds. They'd have to get to the theater early to make sure they got tickets, but also to get good seats.
They would queue up in long lines for the big movies in the lobby, which is the reason why we have big lobbies, was to be able to have these long lines so people could wait there and then get let in and get to fight for their seat. They would view the movie on 35 mm film projectors with analog sound. I know that we all can remember this because it's not that long ago, but it has changed dramatically and AMC has led the way. AMC has led the way. As Adam took you through this platform that we've built, this foundation we've created, it has created a new way of going to the movies.
Instead of waiting for someone to see an ad in the newspaper, we can engage directly with where guests are, which, as many of you know, is online all the time. We can engage with members where they are, which is online. We could either send them emails to let them know, or we could be on social media where they follow us in great numbers, or we could even have advertising on some of the websites that they visit and browse. That gives us a chance to target them with personalized communications on the movies that they would most likely see because we have a database of movies that they've already seen. Instead of having to wait to buy their tickets, they could have the confidence that they will get a ticket because they can buy their ticket online.
Instead of having to wait in line when they go to the theater, they can go right to the drop box and scan their phone to be able to get in right away. Instead of having to wait in line to order their food and wait for it to be prepared, they can go to a pickup counter and pick up their food that's already been prepared because they were able to order it online. Instead of ending the experience there and waiting for them to get inspired by another advertisement that they saw, we're able to continue the conversation after the show via our communications. All of this platform, as built, has enabled us to have this flywheel effect, where the more communications we have, the more likely people are able to come to the movie.
We've built the foundation of a great in-theater experience as well as getting to the theater experience through the way they order online, both food and beverage, as well as their tickets, the experience that they have on screen with an IMAX or a Dolby or Prime at AMC, as well as just our recliners in many of our fine theaters. Finally, when we remind them of what a great time they had with a thank you email or communication, that also helps lead to future moviegoing by closing the loop there. As part of the platforms that we've built and part of this foundation that we've built, that we now have the power to activate, three years ago, we relaunched the AMC website and mobile app. At the time, it was an industry-leading website and app. It wasn't really broken.
It was effective at converting someone who knew what they wanted to do. If someone wanted to buy a ticket to Avengers, we made it very easy for them to find the movie theater, the showtime, and be able to click and buy the ticket in very few steps. It was very efficient, but a little bit clinical. What we did with the relaunch was we created an environment that could inspire people to even want to go to more movies than they originally thought. We're giving them more information. It is much more graphically rich and more dynamic. That exposes them to all that they could see and has been inspiring, and the effect has been much better than ever expected.
We are now, just last week, we had our first week with over 50% of tickets being sold online through AMC properties and those of our partners, with nearly 70% of our tickets being sold through our own proprietary mobile app and website. AMC Stubs, which was also relaunched in 2016, has been highly successful, as Adam mentioned, with the program now boasting over 19 million member households, which represents over 50 million Americans that participate through AMC Stubs. These connections offer us a unique insight into our guests' preferences, enables us to interact with them in a more personalized way in our communications.
Just to give you a scale of how many communications we're talking about that we can impact with this personalization, in 2019, we're expecting to send out over 1.5 billion, that's with a B, 1.5 billion consumer messages via email, text message, and mobile push notifications. All of these messages being personalized to the different consumers based on what they've seen and what we believe that they would be most likely to see going forward. All of this gives us the world's leading theatrical loyalty program in the world as a great foundation for us to activate and move on and continue to build as we move forward. We're not done. We're never going to be done. We are constantly trying to innovate and make our moviegoing experience better, both in theater and outside of theater.
Two of the new initiatives that we're currently activating, one is we're introducing reserved seating across all of our AMC Dine-In and AMC-branded theaters, and we will have that finished by Memorial Day, where virtually all of those theaters will then be online with reserved seating. Reserved seating gives people yet another reason to buy their tickets online, to plan in advance, because they get seat certainty. It just continues to motivate people to buy online, which is another reason to join AMC Stubs, to get your online ticket fees waived, and to do all the things that come with it. It just creates more data for then to us continue to activate against going forward. Second, we are expanding our testing of the mobile ordering of food and beverage.
It has been successful where we have tested it in a small amount of theaters, and we're seeing early results that indicate an uplift of $1.40 on average for each pre-order versus the average ticket at our concession stand. We're expecting to have nearly 150 theaters be online with this amenity by the end of the summer. All of this also reduces the friction for buying online for either tickets or food and beverage, because with the tickets, they know they're not going to get sold out because they can see what's literally available in the auditorium. With food and beverage, if they get to the theater a little late and they're concerned about the line being too long, they've already made their purchase and the food is already prepared, whether it's at a pickup station or delivered to their seat.
Additionally, let's step back to AMC Stubs subscription offering of A-List, which was introduced in June of last year. Just to remind, as Adam talked about, we are now over 750,000 members who are contributing over $200 million in annual recurring box office revenue with their membership fee and over $400 million in total spend when you add in their food and beverage and what we refer to as bring-along spend. Let's go to the next page, which has some of the key information. You heard Adam talk about the incrementality and the visit growth of the frequency of our members. One of the key things on this slide I want to point to is there is a line at 0.75. That is what we've learned to be the baseline of movie-going frequency for the members of AMC Stubs A-List.
That means that of the people who've joined, before they joined A-List, their run rate was about 0.7 movies per month, which is about nine times a year. We know this not because of survey or guest-reported numbers. We know this because many of these members were AMC Stubs before, and we have multiple years of their movie-going history, and we can match up what they did before to what they did after. This is actual member-by-member pre- and post-measurement that gives us the confidence that this is what the baseline was for the members who've joined, 0.75 or about nine times a year. What we've seen with the actual frequency of A-List is that it has consistently dropped since the early days when the heaviest members joined. As expected, it's fallen into a sweet spot, in the mid to high 2s.
Adam talked about the quarter was 2.6 for Q1, which had a 2.8. Number will fluctuate month by month with box office, as well as the fact that some months have four weekends and some months have five weekends. This is what we expected based on our understanding of our program in Europe that has been running for three years. As we talked about when we launched the program, that this was modeled and based on our learning and experience in Europe, and we continue to validate those things that we've done. We're happy to see that with the lift from about 0.75 to in the mid 2s, we're driving frequency over 3x their baseline, which has been very, very beneficial to AMC. With that said, I want to also say that frequency is not the most important factor in the profitability of the program.
In fact, driving frequency down is not our goal. There are two key components in addition to their box office revenue and their membership subscription fee revenue. One is food and beverage spend, and the other is bring-along revenue. When we drive more frequency, we're looking for guests to spend more food and beverage. Maybe not per visit, but per month. What we're seeing is, per month, they're going from 0.75 visits to 2.5 , 2.6, 2.7 visits. That's over three times. We are also seeing that their food and beverage spend goes up two and a half times per month, not per visit, so it's a little less per visit to get to that two and a half times for the month. We also look at the additional tickets that come along with that guest.
From the base period, we're seeing that they're bringing twice as many guests with them as before, who are paying full price. When they go to the premium format, they're paying full price. Not only have that certainty of the membership fee every month, but we now have an elevated food and beverage spend, as well as an elevated bring-along revenue spend. All of these combined feed into the financial circumstances that Adam reported earlier, where we now expect more than $3 per member per month in incremental adjusted EBITDA would be achieved by the end of 2019 as the program continues to grow and mature. Obviously, this exceeded our initial expectations. The program offers a host of other benefits, including new demand generation by consumer attendance. It gives us the first-mover advantage.
It's something we've achieved along the way by growing that membership base very early in what we believe the industry will move to. We have improved customer stickiness through the value of the program and the seamless customer experience we've built that we also believe is unparalleled in the industry. It gives us some normalization against box office variability. Just as a final point, we expect A-List to be dollar-adjusted, EBITDA accretive, but dilutive to margin in 2019. However, it is now a key component of our feedback loop of increased engagement, leading to more data analytics, leading to more personalization, which leads to more guest engagement and visitation to our theaters, which is a good thing. To tie it together, membership admissions revenue that is committed to through a subscription program is very positive.
When you layer on the positives of increased food and beverage spend per month, as well as layering in the bring-along attendance per month, the frequency then is sometimes a plus and sometimes a minus. We are not actively trying to suppress frequency of A-List members because it's something we have to look at on a guest-by-guest basis. There are guests we know that are spending more on food and beverage and bring-along, and those, we make money every additional time they come, so we want their frequency to continue to grow. There are other guests who are less profitable, and we try to manage that. Our frequency isn't correlated to the profitability where the frequency needs to be as low as possible. We're looking to be in that sweet spot, and we feel like we've got there, recently, well ahead of schedule.
All of these things together, member admissions revenue, food and beverage, bring-along attendance, and the range of frequency of visits being in that sweet spot for the overall group, we believe leads to profitability. The goal is to drive profitability, not to reduce frequency. There's a summary of what we've built with the AMC platform based on the website, based on our loyalty program, and most recently, supplemented with our A-List program. With that, I'd like to turn it back to Craig to talk about our more financials.
Thank you, Steven. Well, you remember that slide where Steven went through the previous eras of moviegoing? I've lived through most of that, having been here for about 25 years. I've actually seen this transformation take place over time, the thing that strikes me about it is that we're driving growth in this business of attendance again, we're doing it at a low capital investment through this AMC platform and really the exceptional marketing and guest engagement practices that Steven and his group of associates are responsible for. I think it's one of the more exciting things that we have. I would like to talk about both domestically and internationally, there are some other exciting opportunities that we're pursuing, a long runway of organic growth opportunities that we're executing again, I alluded to that earlier.
The vast majority of which lead to growth in both attendance and incremental spend per guest. We think about them in two different buckets. One. Experiential enhancements that incorporate things like our recliner remodels, our premium food and beverage upgrades, both of which enhance the moviegoing experience. We also think of it in terms of our footprint expansion, which is the opportunistic deployment of capital to selectively build new theaters in attractive locations and/or to acquire underperforming independent theater operations in high-quality locations. Importantly, we have a disciplined approach to determining which projects to pursue, and it's demonstrated by our return on investment that we've achieved in making these investments. We've earned in excess of a 25% return on investment for the U.S. upgrades we've pursued and over a 50% return on investment on the international upgrades that are completed to date.
We'll talk about these growth initiatives in a little bit more detail now. You've heard of us talk about our recliner upgrades, for good reason. These renovations are significant improvements to the moviegoing experience. They help drive traffic. They help drive premium pricing, the results are evident in the numbers. Our upgrades across the global circuit have driven average attendance increases in excess of 25% and theater-level operating cash flow increases of over 100% in the year following renovation. This has led to the 25% or greater than 25% ROI investments, our return on investment in our U.S. domestic upgrades and over 50% ROI on the international upgrades. Importantly, 2018 has marked a year of transition for us as our domestic capital cycle has begun to moderate, we're now focused more on international.
By that, I mean our recliners are now about 75% penetrated domestically, with respect to the upgrade opportunity, while we are in the early stages of the cycle for the international circuit, with only about 15% of the opportunity penetrated. We have a case study a little bit later that will further demonstrate the power of these recliners. Another experiential enhancement is Our premium large format screens, we've talked a little bit about earlier, that being Dolby, IMAX, Prime at AMC, and iSense in Europe. They also enhance the moviegoing experience for our guests, thereby help us generate higher average tickets, anywhere from a 50%-70% premium depending upon the format. We've said before, it's worth repeating, we're the largest IMAX and Dolby exhibitor in the U.S.
Prime is AMC's proprietary large format experience, it's kind of designed for smaller locations where a higher level of investment is not prudent. Even though the ticket premiums aren't maybe quite as large or as significant as IMAX and Dolby, the lack of revenue sharing in this model means really pretty strong economics for AMC, in some cases, actually better than what they are for Dolby and IMAX. The combination of high-definition, big screen presentation, and unbelievable sound makes for a truly worldwide guest experience for our guests in each of these formats. As I mentioned, iSense is our European format, large format, that earns the price premiums that are really comparable to what we see in IMAX and Dolby in the domestic circuit.
One important aspect of the AMC transformation is the diversification of our revenue through the introduction of a variety of premium food and beverage offerings for our guests, and this is primarily domestically at this point in time. These initiatives primarily focusing on offering our guests gourmet selections not traditionally found in theaters, such as artisanal pizzas, thank you, or delicious hamburgers, beer, wine, and cocktails, and also convenience, whether it's ordering ahead or delivering food to your seat. Our investment in these offerings has driven a couple of very important statistics. Higher take rates on food and beverage. That's an increase from 64% take rate in 2011 to a 71% take rate in 2018. Also, a broader diversification of our revenue base, food and beverage revenue having increased from about 20% of revenue in 2011 to 33% in 2018.
Remember, that is at a higher margin or the highest margin between it and admissions revenue. In addition to enhanced food and beverage, we've also rolled out a number of pricing initiatives that have helped drive profitable increases in attendance and admissions revenue, again, principally in our U.S. markets. A Discount Tuesday promotion, which offers or enables AMC Stubs members the opportunity to attend a movie on Tuesday at a discounted price, and the price is typically $5-$6, which has meaningfully increased attendance and theater utilization on Tuesday, which prior to its introduction was the slowest weekday. Now it's second only to Saturday. Discount Tuesdays have had a minimal impact on attendance in other days of the week. We've also implemented a surcharge on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evenings that increased ticket price by about 10% at those theaters were implemented with only minimal impact on attendance.
Next up, we're looking at a tent pole surcharge for large, most popular, high-demand movies, and potentially a zone pricing strategy initiative to optimize price by seat location. We take great care when we implement these initiatives to ensure that the programs drive incrementality and create incremental profitability. We constantly evaluate the optimizations and typically roll them out over time to give guests a chance to kind of process and absorb the changes. An example of that is that two of the initiatives I mentioned, the tent pole surcharge and seat location optimization, will probably or likely be rolled out over the next three to five years in the U.S. However, it's interesting to note that both of these initiatives are already deployed in our European circuit.
The last initiative on experiential enhancements is focused on giving back to the communities where we serve and promoting the cultural aspect of moviegoing as part of our broader goal of becoming a socially responsible company. In early April, we provided 100 free screenings of an award-winning documentary on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to honor the 51st anniversary of his passing. Well-received in over 100 AMC Theatres in 56 different cities. We are also deploying green initiatives, piloting many throughout Europe that you can see, whether it be replacing plastic straws with paper to more waste reclamation and recycling throughout our European circuit. We are leaning into those initiatives as well. Let's talk for a second about growing our circuit. When it makes economic sense and strategic sense, we seek to increase the reach of our network with selective new theater additions.
The footprint expansion is currently contemplated across three geographic areas, three core geographic areas: domestic, Europe, and Saudi Arabia. In the U.S. and Europe, the strategy generally involves opportunistic deployment of capital to selectively build new theaters in attractive locations or acquiring underperforming theaters in high-quality locations. We do so at an ROI historically of about 25%-30% return. Saudi Arabia, our new build strategy is in partnership with the Public Investment Fund. We, as you know, are the first exhibitor to open and operate in the country after Saudi Arabia lifted a long-time, 37-year ban on cinemas as part of their far-reaching liberalization drive. Our approach is a CapEx-like model.
We'll invest about 10% of the capital or about $1 million a theater with a 10% equity interest, and we plan to open between 40 and 50 theaters over the next three to five years with similar return profiles as what we see in our other European new build expansions. Speaking of Europe, I'd like to ask our President of AMC Europe, Mark Way, to provide his perspective on some of the growth opportunities we have in that part of the world.
Thank you, Craig. Good morning. I'm Mark Way, President AMC Europe, as Adam said. I'm delighted to be here with you this morning to share brief details of two of the 26 cinemas that we either refurbished or opened brand new during 2018. When you add to the ten that we did the previous year, that over 10% of our estate in Europe now that is either brand new or, I'd argue, in a better than brand-new condition in our refurbished cinemas over the last two years alone since we joined the AMC family. We're moving at quite a pace to transform our estate within Europe. This first slide that I wanted to share with you is one of those opportunistic new builds that Craig mentioned. This one is in Oslo, in Norway, a cinema called Storo in downtown Oslo. An incredible cinema.
It is the biggest and, in our belief, the best cinema in Norway. Thankfully, our guests also agree. We are welcoming probably over 700,000 guests to this cinema during this year, making it the number one cinema in the whole of Norway. It continues to this day, having opened a year ago, to continue to grow its market share. It's a big cinema. We have 14 screens in total. One of those screens is an incredible IMAX screen. All IMAX screens are incredible, but this one is a particular wow factor, 478 seats. You enter from the rear, and you see a fantastic steeply raked auditorium, an incredible large screen ahead of you. We have 13 other screens, which are a mix of Luxe screens with recliner seats. This cinema is not wholly recliner seats.
It was a site that was under development when we acquired Nordic, so we put in recliner seats where we could, and around 20% of the seats there are recliners and proving incredibly popular. We have a couple of recliner seats. We have our own proprietary iSense screen, and we have standard screens with a mix of recliners and ordinary seating within it. Outside of the auditoriums, this is also a step change in the cinema experience within Norway. We have a great bar, 350 sq m bar. I'm not sure what that is in sq ft, but pretty big. It's an incredible bar. We're seeing people actually coming to the cinema just to experience the bar rather than just attend a cinema, which is great to see.
We have a great food and beverage area that introduced Coca-Cola Freestyle to Norway for the first time, and this cinema now drives the highest food and beverage spend in the whole of Norway for us. It's incredible cinema, but it's also delivering incredible results, as you can see on the screen. The annualized ROI in its first year of operation is around 45%, which is pretty staggering to see. We also opened. I think there's a couple more pictures there. You can see the IMAX screen and the bar. Much more of that you see in a high-end hotel rather than you see in most cinemas. Interestingly, in Norway last year, we opened a smaller cinema just to show that not all these opportunities that we get are of significant scale like this one.
This is a six-screen cinema in a small town in the northern part of Norway, Ålesund, a cinema that has gone up against a local, pretty complacent competitor. Six screens there, including an iSense. Again, about 20% of the seats are recliner. Since the day of opening early last year, we've taken 92% of the local market, which is pretty staggering. Those two cinemas together in Norway have catapulted us to the number one position in the whole country by the end of last year. The second example that I wanted to share with you is one a little bit closer to home for me in London. This is a cinema in North London in, admittedly, not the best area of North London, somewhere off the beaten track in the outskirts of London. It's a cinema in Lee Valley, the ODEON Luxe Lee Valley.
Lux is our brand name that we're using as a sub-brand within Europe to differentiate our refurbished estate within Europe. As we open our refurbished recliner sites, we are calling these Cineworld Lux, UCI Lux, or ODEON Luxe, depending on the various country and the various brands, as in this case. This is a pretty typical example of what we're doing and our core strategies within Europe are rolling out recliners. This was an old cinema, 2004, 12 screens, that had performed pretty well when it opened, but had been declining pretty much since then and faced into some new competition. We took this cinema, we followed the model that AMC have pioneered in the U.S., and we rolled out recliner seats into every screen. We upgraded the lobby. I'll show you a couple of pictures in just a moment. It's performing incredibly well.
You can see the results on your screen. This cinema opened last, I think it was the end of June last year. Since then, we have seen an incredible attendance uplift of 87% in this site. We've seen ticket price stay flat because this is where we've chosen to drive attendance rather than ticket price. In some of our other Luxes, we've taken a slightly different strategy. I'd say the typical approach might be a 20% increase in average ticket price, making sure that this is a luxurious proposition, but a very affordable proposition. Food and beverage sales up here, 24% increase. Again, pretty staggering increase. Thanks to the fact that our landlord invested alongside us, we've delivered a staggering ROI to date. Again, this is a cinema that continues to improve at 59%, well above our target rate.
A few more pictures before and after in the screens. Before, pretty tired, pretty uncomfortable seats in reality that people have known and maybe not loved for a very long time. Taking that to the recliner seats, the fantastic luxury that you're sitting in today with a lot more space and tables to put the food and beverage sales on. That's our iSense screen at the bottom with its black seats and fabulous screen. In the lobby, the lobby now has a real wow factor, which was not there before. This was a pretty empty, dead space beforehand. Got exciting lighting in the ceiling. We've introduced Oscar's Bar. Oscar Deutsch was our founder of ODEON.
Everyone in the U.K. knows the acronym Oscar Deutsch Entertains Our Nation, it's great to be able to honor Oscar in this way, and I'm sure he'd be incredibly proud of what we're now doing in these cinemas. We also have a very successful Costa Coffee franchise in the U.K. that we operate in about 60 of our sites. We introduced that here as well, which is doing a great job of driving additional sales. Just to give you an example by the side of how popular this cinema is proving. A year ago, we launched into the market a small film called "Avengers: Infinity War", around about this time a year ago. On the first day of pre-sales, we sold six tickets to this cinema in its pre-refurbished state. Fast forward on a year, we all know that "Avengers: Endgame" is selling incredibly well online.
On the first day of pre-sales for "Avengers: Endgame" at this cinema, we sold 1,700 tickets, which is a pretty staggering increase. I know that film is doing incredibly well, as Elizabeth said earlier, but I think in this case, most of that increase is down to what we have done in the cinema. I think it's an example of how excited our guests are about what we're doing in Europe with our refurbishment program. Hopefully, these case studies give you a real idea of just why we are so excited about the opportunity that we have ahead of ourselves. With that, I will pass back to Craig.
Thanks, Mark. Okay. Turning to financials, our global financials. AMC has had a long history of revenue and adjusted EBITDA growth as we have achieved scale through a combination of both organic and growth and acquisitions. We are focused on continuing to grow adjusted EBITDA in the coming years, growth that will benefit from a combination of the continued deployment of the AMC platform that we reviewed with you and the long runway of initiatives that we just took you through. We've also generated significant adjusted free cash flow historically. Importantly, these financials include the impact of interest expense, so they're levered, which experienced a significant uptick related to the incremental debt we took on in connection with the acquisitions.
Just to give you some perspective on that, if you look at 2018 adjusted, excluding interest expense or unlevered, you'd find that we had delivered about $580 million of cash flow, adjusted cash flow before interest, compared to about $320 million in 2014. You can get an idea of the growth that we've experienced. As our CapEx moderates over the coming years, we plan to utilize the increasing cash generation to delever our balance sheet, and let's talk about that a little bit more. We mentioned earlier that in March of 2017, we completed a refinancing. We priced and allocated $2 billion of term loans and extended the maturity of the revolver document flexibility. As a result, AMC's capital structure is now free of any significant debt maturities until 2024, or in other words, no material debt payments due for over five years.
The transaction was about five and a half years to a little over 6.8 years. Adam touched on our approach to capital allocation earlier in the presentation, and given the importance of the topic, I want to spend just a couple of more minutes on it to reiterate a couple of important points. First, we will prudently invest in high ROI projects, and as we've talked about before, we utilize a 25% threshold to underwrite projects, minimum threshold, and we'll do that to grow our future cash generation capacity. This has been an opportunity which, as I said earlier, will begin to moderate to more normalized level over the next several years. The second point, we'll utilize the increasing cash to pay down debt and deleverage the balance sheet in improving our long-term strategic flexibility.
This is our priority today and especially as we moderate CapEx over the coming years. Once we've satisfied those two objectives or those two priorities, we'll then opportunistically evaluate returning capital to shareholders through dividends or share buybacks. As we said before, AMC has been on an elevated capital opportunities over the last couple of years. We're now close to reaching saturation for the recliner seating opportunity in our domestic circuit. While the opportunity in our European circuit, although it's smaller in size than the domestic opportunity, we will continue to deploy against at the ROIs that we talked about earlier, in excess of 50%. What I think you'll see going forward is a bit of a natural shift in how we allocate capital, and we kind of started that process in 2018 and gives you a good example.
Due to the size of the domestic and international businesses, the relative size of the two, domestic larger than international, we would expect CapEx to fall as this shift takes place from domestic to international. International CapEx is also expected to moderate over time as the highest ROI projects are completed. If you put it all together, as we've said, we expect net CapEx to fall to a normalized level, $250 million-$300 million over the next three to five years. One other point I'd like to make is that we elected to sell about $500 million of non-core assets over the last couple of years, 2017 and 2018. As a result, our 2017 and 2018 CapEx will look elevated when you compare it to the more typical year where we wouldn't have asset sales.
While 50% of the asset sales were mandated through that Carmike acquisition, we viewed this as an opportunity to proactively engage in portfolio optimization and reallocate capital to those high ROI investments. As you already know, we've talked about 2018 was the best year in our 98-year history with record-breaking financial results. Since we've covered those details in our Q4 earnings announcement press release, we'd encourage you to look at those if you need additional information. Kind of at a high level, full-year attendance grew 3.5% year-over-year. Revenue increased 7.5%. EBITDA was up 13%. Okay. Oops. Let's go back one. Okay.
Let's go back and talk a little bit about walk you again through the medium long-term financial targets, this is the way we think about the AMC opportunity internally, and I think it's a helpful framework for you to think about us as well. For revenue growth, we expect top-line growth between 3%-5% per annum. We think that's 1%-2% above the broader industry growth pattern that we think we'll see and we've seen historically, and that outperformance will be driven by growth initiatives, including the additional continued deployment of the AMC platform. Adjusted EBITDA, we expect adjusted EBITDA to reach a 17%-19% margin percentage over the next several years. We hit a 17% in 2018, we think there's continued expansion opportunity given the fixed nature of costs in our business and the leverage in our operating model.
I do want to note, however, that due to the ramp-up of A-List through 2019, or at least the first half, 2019 is expected to be a transitionary year. Limited in terms of the margin expansion in 2019, again, because of the ramp-up. We talked about CapEx achieving a normalized $250 million-$300 million over the next three to five years, which reflects $150 million of maintenance CapEx and about $100 million-$150 million of net growth CapEx, or about $150 million-$200 million on a growth CapEx basis, including landlord contributions. We've talked about leverage, our priority to bring down leverage. Leverage management important to us. It's top priority.
As such, we expect that to be in the 3.5x-4.5x range over the next three years, and then longer term, we believe an approximate 3x target is a prudent amount of leverage for our company. In terms of the investment opportunity, the combination of the 3%-5% revenue growth and the operating and leverage in our business should produce high single-digit EBITDA growth year-over-year. That alone should deliver highly attractive equity returns even before considering the potential multiple expansion opportunity we think is there as we delever the balance sheet, going forward. With that, I think that's the end of our formal remarks. I think we'll turn it back to Adam for closing remarks.
That is correct. This is a good place to be because then we can do Q&A from here in a minute. I subscribe to the presenter's handbook. Tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them. I'm just going to end this part of our presentation by reminding you what the vision of AMC is at its highest, most basic level. Benefit from economies of scale by being the size leader in our industry. Make sure that we offer the best product of any company in our industry, of the major operators of our size, with big innovations and small innovations, expensive innovations and inexpensive innovations. Whether that means we're putting $5 million into a theater to overhaul and renovate the entire theater or, happily, since we're so far down that road, at least.
Now, a lot of the product innovations that we're taking forward are really very inexpensive for us to pull off, like introducing reserve seating. It's something like $15,000 or $20,000 a theater, and it's a major upgrade for our guests. Third, be bold in looking at how we can innovate in business models. As Stubs and A-List are proving, we've become a leader in returns already early in the life cycle of A-List, and of course, we've been reaping returns from Stubs for years now.
We certainly believe that more than anybody else in our industry, because of the size of the database that we've built, we're able to leverage data, we're able to leverage technology, we're able to leverage the strength of our IT organization, creating technologic interfaces that really serve us well, serve our guests well, and that's good news for anybody associated with AMC, whether that's our studio partners or our investors counting on us that we deliver on the financial promises that we deliver revenue growth, we deliver on margin expansion, we deliver on constraining CapEx and normalizing it back down to where we think it will be a few years from now, and that we de-lever the balance sheet to levels that we think we're comfortable with for the long haul. I'll end on the happiest note I can think of.
Elizabeth shared with you some of the big movies that are coming out this year. While 2019 may have started out slow, this is going to be quite a year. We will end 2019 smiling broadly about our success this year, making us all the more confident in our prospects going forward. With that, we thank you for listening to all of us. May I ask we bring the house lights up as best we can? We would love to move to your feedback, comments, questions, both in the room here in New York, and John will get us whatever the live streamers want to ask us as well. Hopefully, we can get house lights up. That's it for house lights?
Yes.
All right. Somebody's going to have to raise their hand or stand or something so we know where you are and what you're saying. Also, if you'd tell us who you are, if you're not too shy, that'd be a good thing.
I've got a question on A-List. I appreciate the incrementality of bring-alongs and F&B. That's a huge opportunity. Can you help us understand how film rents work for an A-List customer? Is it the same percentage for A-List revenue, recurring revenue that you'd be paid a film rent, or is it based off of what the retail pricing is?
That's one where I don't think we can help you because we've been having detailed conversations with our friends at studios about what those film rents should be. We've got a long-standing practice of not disclosing externally individual proprietary discussions with studio by studio by studio.
Without getting into granularity, if we were to think about the A-List business separately from AMC, would film rents as a percentage of that recurring revenue be higher or lower than your domestic-
They would logically be higher because you already know. Even if you assumed that we were paying normal film rent, right? You know what the subscription price is at somewhere between $20 and $24 a month, depending on what state you live in at the moment. If we're paying film rent, we do pay the film rent on a visit-by-visit basis to the studio. If they're going 2.6 times, we're going to have 2.6 film rents out of a $20 to $24 subscription price. The difference in film rent, while it's marginally higher, it's not that much higher, if you take it in total, not talking about an individual studio. The food and beverage spend is so much higher. Remember, those people were coming nine times a year, and now they're coming 30 times a year. The same is true with take along.
If they were bringing the same number of people with them nine times a year, and they bring the same number of people with them 30 times a year, take along revenue in, the food and beverage revenue in, less all the costs along the way. Minus a slight increase in film rents because they are coming three times more frequently than they did before the program was created. Put another way, we did disclose the frequency, right? If they're coming 2.6 times, they're paying us $20 a month or $22 a month or $24 a month, if you look at what our average ticket revenue is and you multiply that by 2.6, it's just a little bit more than the $20 to $22 to $24 we're charging. That's why this is such a good program for everybody.
The studios are benefiting because there's increased attendance, which means an increased number of film rents, regardless of whatever the price may be, which I don't want to get into publicly about what the price may be. You can assume it's not above full retail anyway.
Right. Well, just on that point.
Let me just finish the answer, then I'll give you a follow-up. The studios are benefiting because they're getting more film rents. They're coming to 2.6 movies a month. We're benefiting get nine take alongs a year, we're now getting 30. This is one where we're creating value to our heaviest users. Go ahead.
That product is greater than the subscription price that you're paying. How is the distribution of that 757,000 A-List subs different than, let's say, your distribution of tickets geographically across the country?
It's more concentrated in some of the larger markets, but we have A-List members in every one of our theaters across the country. It has appeal to many people in many different markets. While it does skew towards the larger markets, it's very well distributed.
Jim Glass, Barrington Research. You've outlined the next biggest potential upside, I think, is the European re-seating and that. Maybe you might go into a little bit more of the aggressiveness in that program. Beyond that, I think there are a couple of things that are bubbling up that'll be valuable in the future, including the dynamic ticket pricing and some of the other initiatives you talked about. Which of those sort of things do you think will carry on the growth and accelerate the growth once this whole platform renovation has sort of run its course?
Hi, Jim. Let me talk about the pricing stuff first, and I'll see if anybody else wants to chime in and what else you're asking. One of the beauties of having a large network, especially across geographic territories, is essentially we've got 1,000 laboratories in our company where we can test and pilot ideas to see what works and what doesn't work without necessarily putting the whole of the system at risk. Because we take something and we roll it out to 1,000 theaters and we see if it works or not. In fact, they've had tent pole pricing in the U.K. for years.
They have zone pricing in the U.K. and across Europe for years, it works in Europe, and it produces real incremental spend because people are willing to pay up to sit in that seat right there instead of sitting in that seat right there because you're a little too close to the screen. Those people can pay just a tad more. The risk, though, in doing all this is you can't layer price increase on top of price increase on top of price increase all at the same time and think that no one's going to notice. We've already quietly introduced weekend surcharges. I bet very few consumers actually realize that we've got dollar surcharges across the United States on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights. We just put in, nine months ago, a major pricing strategy change with A-List, as an example.
We want to be careful that we do not hit them with a tent pole surcharge, hit them with a zone pricing surcharge, because our general theory is nobody is going to notice $0.50 or $1. That is our general theory. Econ 101 in college. They trained us a long time ago, charge more in the peak than you do in the off-peak. If you charge too much, people will resist it because they think you are gouging. We think we can charge an extra. We are charging an extra $1, basically, on the weekend surcharge in most of the theaters where it is in place. But while no one might notice the $1, we did test in dozens of theaters what happens if the weekend surcharge is $2.
They noticed that. Attendance fell. Similarly, if at the same time we are doing weekend surcharges, we then do, in other words, not on the screen, is do we do a higher price for the earliest time in the run? Remember that a third of total box office essentially comes op, o r an extra $0.50, or an extra $1.50, whatever works in the marketplace for opening week or opening weekend as contrasted with the ninth week in a movie's run. There is a lot more visitation up front, charge more in the peak, charge less in the off-peak. We do have those layered right on top of each other. I think then people will notice, well, gee, this one and this one and this one, you add it all together, that turns out it is a 30% or 40% price increase, and that probably does break the bank.
I think what you are going to see on these various pricing initiatives is we kind of roll them out every 12 to 18 to 24 months, A, when we think the market is right for it, and after we test, and to make sure that we are not making a mistake by doing it. Hello, Minneapolis. I do not know that Minneapolis will be the city where we test stuff, but it will be Minneapolis or Phoenix or St. Louis or Dallas or Atlanta or someplace where we will try these things, and oftentimes we will test in a multitude of cities, see what works, and see what the pace of change can be. Anybody else want to answer anything else, Hugh?
Not on your point on pricing there, Adam. My background, as Adam said at the beginning, is the hotel industry, 17 years of it. In that time, I saw the growth of revenue management as a discipline to probably become, aside from the brand, the biggest revenue-earning opportunity they have. Coming into this industry, I think we are still in the foothills of what is possible. I think there is a huge amount we can do. As Adam said, we have got to tread carefully. It is not the same as an airline or a car hire or a hotel. We are experimenting in Europe, and I think there is a lot of upside to be mined in terms of managing and optimizing revenue overall, not necessarily always through higher prices.
You may recall, back in, I think it was 2016, when we put Robert in place, we created the first pricing department, not only that AMC has ever had, but the first pricing department, to our knowledge, that any company in the movie theater industry has ever had, which it's sort of mind-boggling that not until 2016 did someone think when pricing is so important to have a professional organization looking at it full time to see how we can optimize price, whether that's optimizing up or optimizing down. Optimizing price, the weekend surcharge. Our pricing organization has been all over each initiative and a lot of others along the way that we haven't talked about. We think we're really good at this as a company, and we're certainly light years ahead of anyone else in our industry.
The other question, though, related to the European renovation, how much do you think will be renovated and over what period of time? Do you have any sense of that?
I think Craig can start up. We think we're about 15% of the way through on the recliner refurbs at the moment. We're currently at about 26, so roughly maybe another 100 or so to go, but that depends. We'll see what returns we'll get. We'll see how fast we go according to those returns and the capital availability that Craig will let me spend in Europe.
I think there's one other caveat, which is strategically. These markets in Europe are very different from each other. Based on what we've seen on the early results, also remembering that the state of the fleet of theaters that we bought was pretty rundown in the U.K. ODEON, as a circuit, has incredible history and legacy. It's an 80, 90-year-old brand and very well-known brand, but the theaters themselves were pretty rundown and tired. I think one of the places we're sure to have spectacular returns is the United Kingdom. Some of the other countries, like Italy and Spain, we're also the largest movie theater circuit in Italy. We're the largest movie theater circuit in Spain. Pricing is really low. It costs the same amount to renovate a theater, but ticket prices are half in Southern Europe what they are in Northern Europe.
You could make a case that we could gang our renovation capital in Europe into the U.K., where the theaters should benefit the most from improvement in their inherent quality. We got a strong brand with an entire fleet of theaters, and the prices that we charge generally tend to be higher than we do in Southern Europe. I think we'll make a nice, healthy run into the U.K. As a company, I don't think we've decided yet how deeply we'll go in Italy or Spain with theater renovations.
Hi, Chad Beynon from Macquarie. Thanks for everything today. Two-parter on F&B. Actually, one is a follow-up to what you were just saying there, Adam. The difference between the price or the concession per head in U.K. versus the U.S., is that mainly a product issue or is that habit or anything else that you can kind of talk to why the difference is so large? How big can that be? Have you looked at other consumer companies that have rolled this out, and do you generally see an uplift in frequency, or what are your expectations once that's rolled out? Thanks.
Chad, on these, we might do some two-fers on these and give you multiple perspectives, why don't you start on the European consumer in F&B versus the American consumer, I want to chime into that one, too.
Okay. The food and beverage take in the U.K. is generally a bit lower than it is in the U.S., I think you mentioned the word habit. I think that's largely what it is. The difference is not really in product. We sell a very similar product range. At the core of that is Coca-Cola, fizzy drinks, and popcorn. We equally have a lot of film food. We sell chicken tenders, nachos, just as you do over here. It's a very similar product range. We're always trying to refine that product range, improve it, and we're doing more of that as we speak. The primary thing is habit in terms of people typically buy less when they're coming into the cinema. When you look across Europe, that is true across the territories.
The U.K. is actually one of our higher pickup rates, sits around about 50-odd percent, but that is considerably lower than you might see in the U.S. When you go down to Southern Europe, it's even lower, again, largely down to habit through the same range. We think we're addressing that. Some of that is through pricing, some of it might be through bundled pricing, some of it is through product, some of it is through training of our staff and trying to just change that paradigm. We're having some success. We've driven some pretty significant growth in our food and beverage spend per person and our pickup rates across our estate in all of our countries in the last couple of years. That's going to continue.
On that, just staying on that point, Chad. I do agree that habit is the primary driver, but I also think that imagination of the supplier, meaning the cinema operator, also is a factor at what has either driven habit or has not driven habit. When we bought the Nordic Circuit in Scandinavia, and a lot of us who are sitting here today toured a lot of theaters in Scandinavia to decide whether we want to go forward. One of the things that was striking was how much better a job Nordic, as a company, had done in creating its concession areas than other operators in Europe. I'm not just talking about ODEON. I'm just broadly across Europe. Guess what? They're gonna sell more, and that's what they did.
When we renovated these 26 theaters that we've already done, we didn't just put in recliner seats, which as comfortable as and attractive as they are and spacious as they are. We also went in the lobbies and, I don't want to say sexed up the lobbies, but we made the lobbies much more appealing and much more glamorous, gave a lot more area for the concession operation to exist, and made it just such a more attractive entity that you would think that regardless of habit, the fact that you've got a nicer concession area, a nicer food area, that should, over time, increase the habit of patronizing that thing. Whereas if it's a small dingy counter, which really is the case in a lot of theaters in Europe, not just at our company, but across the continent.
It's much easier to walk by that counter because it's not appealing. We just did a massive gut to the studs redo of the ODEON Leicester Square, which is the most important theater in all of Europe, the most prestigious theater in all of Europe, opened in the 1930s, has had 700, 800 world premieres or European premieres of movies there, was the theater of the royal family for decades and decades. Literally everybody in the U.K. has heard of the ODEON Leicester Square. I think you heard in that, for some of you who were in the room at the beginning, that director who talked about the first movie theater he ever went to was the ODEON Leicester Square.
One of the things we did in the renovation, not just improve the seating inside the auditorium, not just improve the sight and sound technology in the auditorium, but we expanded the size of the lobby, made it much more attractive, probably a quadrupling of the real estate allocated to the concession operation. As sure as we're sitting here, over time, regardless of what the habit is in the U.K., that new improved concession area is going to outsell the old one. With respect to what can mobile preorder do, you want to lead with that, Stephen?
Yeah. We've been active with mobile preorder in a few dozen theaters, kind of scattered across the country, not consolidated, that's what gave us the $1.40 per spend for the people who have been participating. What we are now looking to do is take it to the next step because we don't know how high is high. Even looking at other industries, we're just not sure what it can be, but we do know there is some there there. What the next phase is to put it into whole markets, such as New York City and Boston and Los Angeles, all of that is happening this spring, which will be followed by marketing campaigns where we can talk about it because all theaters in the market will have it.
We believe that that will help to drive the results even higher in terms of take rate and in terms of incremental spend. We think we're at the early stages of what this could do, but we're not exactly sure how high is high.
You asked, are there other industries? Some companies in the pizza space are selling two-thirds of their pizza orders online through their mobile app, their website and mobile web, but mostly their app. I don't think we're going to get that high. I don't necessarily know that we're even going to get close to that high. The point is, the world is moving to the telephone, people are doing on their phone far more than they ever imagined five years ago or 10 years ago, we want to make sure that we have a really well-functioning smartphone app, so that whatever we can take to market on the app, we can take to market on the app and do it well. We've already done it with ticket sales. Glued to their smartphone. That's how they're buying their tickets. Same with Stubs.
I'll give you an incredible stat. I believe we sell more tickets on the app than on the web. Is that right? 90%-
100% more.
Right. 97% of the people buying their tickets on the app are members of Stubs, 97%. It just shows you that we've created this, we said before, this seamless, frictionless experience where a customer gets loyal to AMC, and we leverage technology to make it even easier for them to stay sticky with AMC, and they like it. We've done it with ticket sales. Stephen mentioned that we just crossed 50% for the first time with ticket sales, with 35 points of the 50 points coming from AMC's proprietary channels. Five, seven years ago, that would've been 5% of our business would've been coming from our proprietary channels, and it's up to 35% today. We're already doing it with ticket sales. The next frontier is food and beverage.
Just to underscore the importance of the mobile app, it's interesting to see anecdotally many A-List subscribers actually refer to it as AMC's new app, as opposed to new loyalty program or subscription program. They'll refer to it as the app, and they see it as interchangeable with their whole A-List is just the app.
I spent 11 years in the airline industry. I remember the first airline who tried to put kiosks at airports to let's say to check in. They weren't used. The kiosks went in, they were not used. It was mostly the East Coast around the old Eastern Air Lines Shuttle, for those of you who are really old in the room. Most of you don't even know Eastern Air Lines existed. The kiosks weren't used. Now we all go to airports. I think most of would rather check in the machine than talk to a human. It's more reliable. As a company, within our category, we've been leading the charge on leveraging technology to advantage our guests and therefore to advantage ourselves. Someone else. Go ahead, right here. Let's get the man a mic.
Hi there, Alan Gould from Loop Capital. I've got two questions, please. First, the age-old question on windows. Secondly, for John, it looks like you're projecting about 2.5%, the maintenance CapEx remains about 2.5% of revenue, $150 million on what's probably going to be $6 billion of revenue in a few years. Just seems awfully low. If you could just address those two questions.
Elizabeth, why don't you start on windows. Then I'll pile on. Go ahead.
As you say, the windows conversation has been coming and going for years, driven almost exclusively by economic pressure on the home entertainment business, while, as we've talked about, the theatrical business continues to grow, slowly and steadily over a long time. We are, based on the potential of the AMC platform, almost exclusively focused with studios on upside in the theatrical business. At this time, we're having no active conversations about changing the windows for the home entertainment business.
On the windows conversation, I want to take us back three years. For about a year and a half or two years, we had active dialogue. This is what I am talking, 2016 and 2017. We had active dialogue with studios about possible changes in windowing. Some of them thought this was a real opportunity for them. They were nervous about their home entertainment business shrinking, and maybe they could do something, get to the home faster. Some of them put out information into the market that this was going to happen imminently. I think it helps being the largest exhibitor in the world. We get a seat at that table. That is not something that is going to be imposed upon us unilaterally by studios. That is a discussion.
I do think people who were afraid of PVOD, as it was called, who were really concerned about it, they were not necessarily listening to what we were saying. What we were saying is, we were willing to think creatively. We, AMC, that is. I am not necessarily saying this is true of our competition. We were willing to think creatively. We were willing to think out of the box. We were willing to see if there were alternative ideas to the status quo. We would only sign on to something if it advantaged our shareholders. We would not sign on anything that would disadvantage our shareholders. Guess what? Since no deal was reached, they did not launch.
A lot of people thought they might launch anyway, but they did not launch, and they could not launch because it was not something that they were prepared to ram down our throat, and they knew that our response, if they did, would be visceral and severe.
I will say it again. While Elizabeth is correct that there are no discussions taking place, and have not been for quite some time on changes to the window, I still think AMC should think creatively and think out of the box. It is in our interest for studios to be profitable. If studios are more profitable, they will make more movies. If they make more movies, we will show more movies. If we show more movies, we will make more money. If there is some alternative to the current status quo, which is good for us, or alternatively, no skin off our teeth, okay.
Why would we ever say yes? Fortunately, because we are the largest player around, we got a seat at the table. There is one other development. It just so happens that the studio that is most supportive of the current window, meaning the status quo, is Disney. It makes sense, right? Disney has made high grossing movies. They are the leader in the tent pole strategy. Their movies are event movies. Their movies are made to be seen on screens like this, and they are doing very well. Their movies are bringing in billions of dollars. They are very happy with status quo, and they do not want to see a change. They just bought Fox.
They have been very loud and very vocal, publicly and privately, that they flipped Fox from being a let's change the windows status quo, to we're not changing the windows status quo. Disney now has 40% market share when you add in Fox. The fact that Disney has morphed into a very strong advocate for the status quo probably suggests that the status quo is not going to move all that easily, unless, as I said, we come up with a creative way to do it where it's in their interest, and our interest.
In so many of the points we've made today, the status quo is something we're looking to innovate and be creative beyond. But theatrical windows are the smartest strategy that the studio distribution executives ever evolved. They allow a studio who's put fixed production costs, creative investments into a film to continue to sell it, bring it to market in new and different formats, and sell it again and again and again, fresh each time. While we are, of course, willing to and do innovate with our studio partners with every film that they bring to market, we also respect that the theatrical business, this exclusive window, this platform we described today, has never been more economically important to them and to all of their investors, and it's why we're investing in it more and more over time.
Look at what happened. There's a lot of discussions about let's not kill the golden goose that's laying the golden eggs. Fortunately, 2018, the industry box office was $11.9 billion, or just under. First time in history it's ever been above $11.5 billion. One studio exec after another studio exec is running around smiling about how much money they got out of theaters, up $800 million more domestically than the year prior. They're very cautious about wanting to do something that might put all that production coming out of the theatrical network at risk.
The other question was on the 2.5% level of maintenance CapEx. I think my response would be that there are so many similarities between the capital deployment cycle that we just finished and the one this industry experienced from 1995 to 2000. I think, Alan, you may have been around that point in time. What we found when we looked at the two was, for our company, the similarities were we were building new theaters in that deployment cycle that enhanced the guest experience in many, many ways. Our leverage increased to a point of about 5.8 times in 2000 as we went through that cycle. There's a similarity. As we've gone through this cycle, our leverage has gone up as we've deployed in high ROI guest-enhancing investments.
The other thing that we saw happen in around 2000 was that that new model of theater build matured and was saturated in the markets, and we saw a decline in CapEx by all exhibitors from 2000 forward. That's the point we're making again today. We think that we're there in this recliner remodel phase or deployment cycle at this point in the U.S., and that CapEx is naturally ready to decline because that we've reached saturation. There's another similarity. The other thing we saw was CapEx levels, ours. Now we were a smaller company. I think we spent $200 million, almost $300 million in capital CapEx in 2000. It was $100 million two years later. Leverage three or four years later, I think, was down in the 3.5 times.
That's why we think and believe strongly that our capital CapEx can decline going forward, and that we can bring leverage down as we harvest the cash flows from the investments made, just like we did in 2000. Now to your question, what did maintenance CapEx go to as we looked at this period subsequent to 2.5% revenue? When we put in new seats is the cost going to be more? There's half as many seats, so in fact, the cost is about the same. We think the 2.5% of revenue level is going to be enough to maintain the circuit going forward, just as it was in the last deployment cycle.
Since you raised this issue of history, it's important to talk about how the capital is different these days than it was in prior years. In prior years, when people were building a lot of new theaters, you committed to a new theater, it was a three-year construction project. You signed the dotted line at the beginning of the three years, you spent all that money. The construction projects that we're doing when we renovate a theater, they're 4-6 months. They're 3-6 months. If we need to cut back on a construction effort, we have the ability to do it on a dime. Last year, not 2018, 2017.
Yeah.
Two years back, when the box office cratered in the summer, not because there's anything structural going on in demand for moviegoing, just Hollywood had a few clunkers. In June, we decided to lower our CapEx spend. We took $100 million out of the CapEx plan in 60 days. We didn't have that flexibility in different years. We do have that flexibility now. Everything that we've talked about today in terms of how long it's going to take to ramp down the CapEx spend from what was $500 million down to $250 million-$300 million, that's assuming that everything stays strong and robust and bullish, and the ROIs on the projects which you're investing are still attractive and tempting.
One of the best protections we have is if things were too slow, which is what give people pause about the CapEx spend, we would slash the CapEx spend like that. Because by definition, the ROIs would not be as attractive in a non-robust period. Where now we're in a robust period where we get some really attractive projects that we still think we should pursue, like his 59% ROI in Scandinavia, or Lee Valley. You've got to be hard pressed not to want to spend capital to turn down a project with a 59% unlevered ROI. We still do want to produce growth, and that's one of the many ways we can do so.
Craig, if I could just follow up. Why is your maintenance CapEx as a % of revenue so much lower than your primary public competitor in the U.S.?
A large part of maintenance has been taken care of in the recent remodel cycle that we've gone through. We remodeled theaters, we performed a lot of maintenance. Maybe there was some deferred in there, but I think generally our circuit's more modern and we've maintained it on a more current basis going forward, and we build in a lot of maintenance remodel into these remodel projects.
Also remember, if you made a theater all new 36 months ago, inside at least, it's kind of new. It's not going to need money for quite some time. We've already spruced up a lot of our circuits, far more than one of our largest public competitors. Someone else?
Yeah. Right here. Ryan Tubby, William Blair.
I don't see. Where are you?
Right here.
I see you. Go ahead. Great.
Adam, going from nine trips a year up to 30 is a pretty massive change in consumer behavior, perhaps more so than the value prop of, let's say, two and a half movies for the price of two. Can you talk about just why you're seeing this kind of consumer buy-in or change in behavior outside of that?
Steven, Elizabeth, you want to answer that?
Yeah. Because people love going to the movies. If they are now able to have a fixed price and be able to go, they will explore. They'll go to movies that they're on the fence about. They'll go to smaller independent films. They'll try premium formats that they hadn't tried before. They explore, and they talk about it with their friends, and it feeds itself in their own personal life. The more they go to the movies, the more trailers they see. The more trailers they see, the more movies are on their list that they want to see upcoming. It really just speaks to how much people love going to the movies. It unlocks the capability that so many moviegoers have of being able to go to many more, given the opportunity.
Once you have a fixed price, that becomes one less obstacle to going more often. We think that's really the key.
If I can add. Go ahead, Elizabeth.
One of the surprising things, though, within that for us, has been the degree to which we've seen a lift in repeat going to the same movie. Right? Often we see with different people who are other AMC Stubs members. That's exciting and surprising. It's probably 20% of the growth in increased frequency are people seeing their favorite movies a second time-
Because it's free
bringing other friends.
It's free, right? They would have to pay for it to see the same movie, and they'd ask those questions, "Well, why am I paying another $10 to see the movie I saw 2 weeks ago?" With A-List, it doesn't cost them any more to go see the movie a second time. They really enjoyed it. Good. The other comment I was going to make, though, is I tell you, we probably should add the head of our IT department up on this stage, too, because we have a sensational IT organization, and it's working so well in interdisciplinary ways with our other departments. As we were developing the A-List program, just literally every department, marketing, ops, programming, pricing, IT, finance, it was just everybody was in the room designing what the program was going to be and designing how the guest was going to access it.
If you go into the chat rooms about A-List, as I did, and he did, does, I stopped actually. I was in the Reddit chat rooms for months, reading literally hundreds of comments from guests about A-List from probably the June launch. I probably checked out around December, January. I'm glad you're still reading them all. I must have read thousands and thousands and thousands of comments. What they were saying, it's so easy to use. This is not just an issue about price, or that they love the movies. This is also that we've built something that's quite unique, that the other guys who have systems don't have, the other guys who are saying they're going to white label for other players in the industry don't have, and those players won't have.
It's so easy to get into our theater using the IT platform that we built, either on the web, mobile web, or app. I think that's one of the other reasons why people are using A-List so much, because it's just such a breeze. The other thing is, we decided in the pricing to include 3D, IMAX, Dolby, and Prime. We raised the pricing accordingly, knowing that a significant chunk of people were going to go into the premium format screens. Well, that's an enormous competitive advantage for AMC, because we've got more IMAX screens than anybody else, we have more Dolby screens than anybody else, we have more 3D screens than anybody else. That's one more reason to sign on into our system. Once you sign on to the system, it sort of takes on a life of itself.
Adam is absolutely correct. That user experience, all that technology is the platform that we were speaking about during the presentation. That platform foundation that we have is now leverageable across many other things. I did say it was unparalleled. I think it's an unparalleled ease of use experience from a customer experience. Something we're proud of and something that we think facilitates moviegoing for both A-List members, AMC Stubs members, and beyond. It makes it easy for everyone.
It's no accident that we decided to put in reserved seating in all of our theaters. Our strategy until this year had been that we would have reserved seating at those theaters with recliner seats, that we wouldn't have reserved seating at theaters without recliner seats. I can give you 20 minutes of discourse on why someone came to that conclusion, but that was the conclusion corporately that we came to. In a post A-List environment, in an environment where half the people are choosing their seats online in advance, instead of 12% are booking their tickets online in advance, it's just natural that that's going to morph into, hey, we ought to offer reserved seating in all of our theaters. Guess what? We're doing that, nobody's matching us.
It's going to be another competitive advantage that we have against the rest of our industry.
Yeah, just one follow-up. Given the three-month commitment to A-List, I get your visibility on churn is probably still somewhat new, but just wondering if you're seeing any change in churn as you increase your penetration, also then the benefits of tag-along and food and beverage. Has that changed as you've grown the participation in the group?
It's still early to really get long-term trends. Know that we are watching all of those metrics weekly, daily. The churn is within the modeled range of what we expected, as so many of the other things are. We had the benefit of Europe running a program for several years. That gave us foresight into what we thought the frequency would be, but also what we thought the churn would be. We're within that range as well. No specific details to share, but we're confident that it's what we expected. As Adam said, that the current membership levels reflect that that's net of the churn. The growth is very, very strong and much higher than what anybody would be believing, but well within range of what's expected.
By the way, I may not be reading the Reddit chat rooms anymore, but I assure you, I'm looking at membership counts, churn rates, food and beverage spend per patron weekly, if not daily. How many conversations have we had on weekends and late at nights on where we're going and what we're doing? I actually think I'm going to share with you one little data point that I love, actually.
I actually saw some evidence that our food and beverage spend is rising amongst this population, that early in the program, back when the usage was in those August, September, October days when the frequency was closer to three and a half times a month than two and a half times a month, there was less food and beverage spend per visit, not per month, per member, but per visit, in part because if you came last week and you had an 80-ounce tub of popcorn, how much more popcorn can you eat six days later, right? One of the things that we've done, including really overhaul our whole F&B organization, to start thinking about the clients who are coming in on Tuesdays, because they're more price sensitive by definition, they're paying less to get in, turning Tuesdays into the second business day of the week.
Whoever would've thought that could happen? A-List people who are coming over and over again, is what things can we put in our concession operations to get those people to continue to buy. Actually, I've seen food and beverage spend per patron amongst A-List clientele rise dramatically recently as contrasted with, let's say, September. That's not an accident. That's just, it's not happening on its own. I think it's happening in part because their frequency has fallen a little bit, so they are willing to have the 72-ounce Diet Coke, and the 85-ounce thing of popcorn. Also because we're experimenting with sizes and specials and deals so that we can lure them into making a purchase as opposed to walking past a concession stand and not spend.
Let's take one from the internet.
Sure
on the webcast. Can you talk about the current relationship between you and Silver Lake and insights they might be bringing?
Yeah. I'd be happy to. That didn't come from Menlo Park, California, did it?
It did not.
I'm going to speak personally for a second if I can. Professionally too, but personally. By fluke, until 1996, I had no real involvement with private equity. I got hired by a major private equity firm, one of the largest, with over $200 billion under management, to run one of their portfolio companies as their CEO. I lasted 10 years. I do believe that is a world record at that particular PE shop of someone serving as a CEO of a portfolio company. Incredibly, it was Vail, and I lived in the mountains for 10 years, 135 miles from the city. I wanted to do that.
I stepped down on my 10th anniversary, and that same private equity firm said, "Well, we fooled you for 10 years and you fooled us for 10 years, why don't you join our firm as a senior operating partner to be part of our firm?" I became a senior operating partner as Apollo for another 10 years. My association with that firm lasted 20 years, and I'm still on the board of directors of one other company for profit, and that's Norwegian Cruise Line, which, until a few months ago, Apollo was the largest shareholder. The point of all that is so I've had a lot of dealings with PE. I just cannot believe how lucky I am that we found Silver Lake in 2018 to come in and be a significant source of currently debt capital, but potentially equity capital when it converts.
As you know, it's got a convert feature at about $19 a share. These are the smartest, nicest people I've ever come across. They are paying a lot of attention to us. They like us, they like our company, they like our industry. I don't want to put words in their mouth, but talk about hurdle rates being high. A PE shop as successful as Silver Lake did not put $600 million into AMC because they'd like to get a 2.95% interest rate. They have very high hurdle returns and expectations, and if you do the modeling that we sort of talked about in the presentation, if we can drive this revenue growth and if we can drive margin expansion, and just look at the equity value that will be created at this company.
Add to that, I don't really want to talk multiples very much today, but add to that we're trading at a trough multiple, way below the average multiple that we traded at over the past many years. Add multiple expansion on top of that, you're talking about the opportunity for dramatic increase in the equity share price at AMC. I can say that because I am an AMC shareholder. I own a lot of stock, some of which is part of my compensation, and some of which I bought in the open market, just because I actually believe the kind of things that we have been doing and telling you today. I will tell you, Silver Lake has a really nice bedside manner. They don't tell us what to do. They don't own a share, so they can't really tell us what to do.
They're so smart, and they're giving us so much time. I really think that we got the benefit. It's almost like we've hired one of the smartest consulting firms in the world to give us advice on what to pay attention to and what to do. Yet, in this case, they're not charging us for it, so it's free advice, and they're not insisting that we take it. I said, this very nice bedside manner. I just really count myself so fortunate that we got some really smart people who really believe in our future and the prospects ahead to pay attention to us, to give us advice. It's only been seven months, but so far every piece of advice they've given us has been good, if not very good.
That's how I would respond to some of my questions that came in from the internet.
Great, Adam. That's going to take us to just a little bit past the top of the hour. Why don't you finish up here with any closing remarks you might have?
I just want to make sure, is there anyone in the room who wants to ask a question that didn't? We got nothing else to do today. We're not in Kansas City, we're here, and we're here for you, but I'm happy to wrap if you'd like. I will say that all of us are prepared to stay up here upfront and engage with you one-on-one, as you would wish for essentially as long as you'd like to go today. My wrap-up, I mean, is exactly what I said just a few minutes ago when we finished Q&A. The prospects for this company are so bright. Just look at our market position. The scale leader, the quality leader, the innovation leader, the technology leader, the digital engagement leader. That's a good position to have.
We think we got a very strong team running the company. Honestly, we believe our shares are, so we say, handsomely priced, meaning we think there's a lot of bargains to be had right now. As we post the kind of results that we believe we're capable of posting, we did just come off a record year where first quarter be damned with a slow start, but boy, this year should be a strong one. We think as we continue to post strong results, Kansas City, which is our corporate headquarters, it's in Missouri. To do. We posted great results in 2018. I hope to post great results in 2019. We hope to keep this going as we described in the presentation and for the reasons that we described in the presentation.
If we can deliver, which we have every confidence we'll be able to, this ought to be a happy time ahead for AMC shareholders. With that, we thank you for participating today. Your time is precious. We appreciate that so many of you spent with us. As I said, we're all going to stay up here up front and look forward to engaging with you one-on-one.
Thanks, Adam, for those remarks. That concludes AMC's 2019 Investor Day. Again, on behalf of all of us, thank you for joining us to learn more about AMC.