Vue Entertainment Ltd: Box office hit
Just as the movie industry was beginning to recover from the catastrophe of Covid, when screens went dark for months on end, it got another kick in 2023 from the Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes, which significantly limited the slate of new product available for the next two years. Finally the tide appears to have turned at the box office, and the industry has at long last recovered from what Vue founder and CEO Tim Richards described as “six years of hell”.
Vue is Europe’s largest privately owned cinema operator with 220 movie houses, and it was taken over by its lenders in 2022 in a £1bn financial restructuring. Its owners have appointed advisers to pursue a potential sale or listing at a valuation of around £1.5bn. If it does decide to list on the London Stock Exchange, this will be good news for a market that has been struggling to attract new listings. Vue will be looking to capitalise on a record-breaking year with five films grossing over $1bn and Spider-Man: Brand New Day becoming the highest-grossing film of all time in the US.
The trend in general seems to be for people to go to the cinema less often but spend more when they do. Long gone are the days when you could get away with a cheap ticket, a tub of popcorn and a large Coke; now the experience involves a cocktail or two and a full meal in a luxurious seat in front of a giant screen and a sound system that rattles the bones.
PwC: Messy in the Middle East
Triggering the wrath of one of your major clients is rarely a recipe for a bumper year, especially when that client is the Public Investment Fund (PIF), Saudi Arabia’s $1tn sovereign wealth fund. After PwC attempted to poach a member of the PIF’s internal finance team in 2025, the PIF banned PwC from bidding for new advisory work. Given the interconnectedness of the Saudi economy, this had major repercussions, and PwC’s income in the Middle East as a whole fell by 15% last year.
PwC’s Middle East business is part of PwC UK, which announced that annual revenues fell 3% to £6.16bn, its first drop in revenue since 2009. Its headcount was down from 35,400 last year to 31,200, but amid all the gloom at least the firm was able to keep its partners from queuing up at the entrance to the poorhouse, awarding them an 8% pay rise to a comfortable average whack of £935,000. This puts them in silver medal position among the big four, behind Deloitte but ahead of KPMG and EY.
The major issue facing the big four is how AI is likely to affect their business models, with technology able to automate routine audit and consulting work, leaving clients dangerously prone to question how large fees can be justified. The industry is making brave noises about how technology can improve the quality of its work, including by having a model scan the entirety of a client’s data rather than having some dozy junior sample a fraction of it, but it remains to be seen how the billing trajectory will go.
