After ‘Black Widow’ fails to lift AMC stock, retail traders are trying to become their own ‘Avengers’

Retail traders on social media are trying on Wednesday what even Natasha Romanoff, aka the “Black Widow”, couldn’t do on Monday or Tuesday: lift the share price of AMC Entertainment AMC, -10.00%.

Despite the blockbuster return of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to big screens on Friday with Scarlett Johansson’s standalone “Widow” film hauling in $80 million to break the previous post-pandemic record of “F9”s $70 million opening weekend in June, shares of cinema chain AMC fell almost 15% on the first two trading days of the week, a drop that maddened bullish investors in AMC on internet platform Reddit.

Rallying around the fact that AMC announced on Monday morning that “Approximately 3.2 million people watched movies at AMC’s United States and international theatre locations between Thursday, July 8 and Sunday, June 11,” the highest turnout in 16 months, retail traders blamed the stock drop on their old enemies: short selling hedge funds that they believe have regained control of the stock price via manipulation despite the fact individual investors own roughly 80% of AMC’s float.

And while some investors might have seen the fact that “Black Widow” also made $60 million from premium streaming downloads on Disney+  as a signal that the theater business is still dealing with an existential threat, Redditors didn’t take the result lying down.