Months after publicizing plans to begin accepting the cryptocurrency bitcoin in exchange for movie tickets and concessions, the movie theater chain AMC announced on Wednesday that it would also will also soon begin accepting ether, bitcoin cash, litecoin, expired Bed Bath & Beyond coupons, and promises whispered beneath the light of the full moon if that’s what it will take to get people to come see movies in person again.
In a Wednesday tweet, AMC Entertainment Holdings executive Adam Aron said that the company’s plans to start accepting the cryptocurrency payments—which have gained momentum and legitimacy as accepted tender among the investor class in recent months—will mostly likely go into effect by the end of the year.
“Cryptocurrency enthusiasts: you likely know @AMCTheatres has announced we will accept bitcoin for online ticket and concession payments by year-end 2021,” Aron wrote in the tweet. “I can confirm today that when we do so, we also expect that we similarly will accept ethereum, litecoin and bitcoin cash.”
Indeed, AMC announced in August that it would soon begin accepting bitcoin as a payment method for movie tickets and concessions in the U.S. by the end of 2021, despite the coin’s astronomical transaction costs and staggering volatility—both of which make it a less than ideal way to pay for, say, a $10 tub of popcorn.
Activists have also been sounding the alarm on concerns about the worrying carbon footprint wrought by large-scale crypto mining operations, even as the decentralized coins are being taken increasingly seriously by companies hoping to be at the vanguard of crypto payment models. While multinational companies like Microsoft, Whole Foods, and PayPal have long signaled their support for alt payments as early adopters of crypto, other large companies, like Amazon, have waded into the fray more recently. As recently as July, an anonymously sourced report in the London newspaper City A.M claimed that the Jeff Bezos-owned Amazon not only plans to accept bitcoin by the end of the year, it’s also kicking around a proposal to develop its own cryptocurrency—a kind of “native coin” that the company might one day reward customers for paying with.
The news also comes just days after El Salvador enacted a law that officially recognizes bitcoin as a form of legal currency, becoming the first country in the world to do so. Although the law has delighted crypto enthusiasts—and Salvadorians hopeful that its implementation will help them avoid capital gains taxes on bitcoin in the country—it has also drawn considerable scrutiny, both for security vulnerabilities in the country’s official crypto wallet app and among those who worry that bitcoin has little use outside of its function as a speculative asset.