Cinemark CEO Sean Gamble Kelly Williams A month ahead of its annual shareholder meeting, major theater chain Cinemark has disclosed its pay for its C-suite, with its top executive seeing a 10 percent bump 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. That’s up from $9.8 million in 2024 and $8.8 million in 2023.
Melissa Thomas, the CFO of Cinemark 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 Theatres as well as Regal, has made market share gains of late to about 15 percent of domestic box office as AMC grapples with its debt load and Regal emerges from bankruptcy protection under new leadership. It operates 496 theaters with 5,637 screens in the U.S. and Latin America.
Cinemark has managed to grow 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 touted $1.2 billion in food and beverage revenue, which it says marks 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 sustain a high-quality circuit,” Gamble wrote in the 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 exhibitor also disclosed its CEO-to-employee pay ratio (923 to 1) in its securities filing, noting that 69 percent of employees are part-time, with many paid hourly, and the median-compensated employee saw pay of $11,718.
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