A month before its annual shareholder meeting, major movie theater chain Cinemark revealed pay for its executive suite, with its chief executive seeing a 10 percent increase in compensation for 2025.
Sean Gamble, 51, who has led the exhibitor chain as CEO for the past four years, saw total compensation (including stock awards and incentive plan pay) rise to $10.8 million last year, the exhibitor disclosed in a securities filing on Wednesday. This is up from $9.8 million in 2024 and $8.8 million in 2023.
Melissa Thomas, Cinemark’s chief financial officer who joined the theater chain from Groupon five years ago, saw pay of $3.36 million, up from $2.94 million in 2024 and $2.69 million in 2023.
The chain, which competes with longtime leader AMC Theaters as well as Regal, has recently posted market gains of about 15 percent of the domestic box office as AMC struggles with its debt load and Regal emerges from bankruptcy protection under new leadership. It operates 496 theaters and 5,637 screens in the United States and Latin America.
Cinemark has grown its monthly membership program, Movie Club, to 1.45 million subscribers, adding recurring revenue to the mix that includes 193 million attendance receipts last year domestically and abroad. The Plano, Texas-based exhibitor also reported $1.2 billion in food and beverage revenue, which it says represents an all-time high.
“2025 was a pivotal year for Cinemark as we fully retired our remaining pandemic-related debt while at the same time strategically investing $219 million of capital expenditures in theater preservation and enhancement projects to maintain a high-quality circuit,” Gamble wrote in an April 1 letter to shareholders. “Furthermore, our strong cash position and free cash flow generation enabled us to return $315 million to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases.”
The bidder also disclosed its CEO-to-employee pay ratio (923 to 1) in its securities filing, noting that 69 percent of employees are part-time, many are paid hourly, and the employee receiving compensation saw an average pay of $11,718.
