A Pennsylvania Moviegoer Has Sued AMC Over the Convenience Fee. Here Is Why It Had to Be Pennsylvania: the Federal Junk-Fee Rule Says in So Many Words That Film Screenings Are Not Live Events. And Every Cinema Fee Settlement You Can Actually Claim From Has Already Closed.

We would rather publish a short verified list than a long plausible one. The docket for this case is not in the free federal mirror because it is a state filing; the trade report that broke it puts the complaint behind a paywall; and the county register that would settle it requires an account. We searched the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas ourselves for both AMC entity names and ruled that county out. Allegheny County we could not search. After this article first appeared, Top Class Actions (September 9, 2026) reported the caption, number, county and plaintiff; we mark those details as its report below.

Be careful with the numbers circulating for this case. The figures of about $2 to $3 a ticket, and $2.19 specifically, come from the New York AMC case of 2024. They are not this case's numbers. For the Pennsylvania complaint, Top Class Actions reports $2.69 a ticket.

Kelley Drye's summary of the complaint describes the mechanism this way: AMC “displays a price for each ticket at the beginning of the purchase flow,” and later “adds a ‘Convenience Fee,’ which is mandatory unless a consumer instead elects to pay an annual $17.99 fee to join.”

This is the part that explains the case. There are two ways an American consumer normally attacks a drip-priced fee, and in Pennsylvania both are unavailable.

The federal rule does not reach cinema tickets

The FTC's Trade Regulation Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees, 16 C.F.R. Part 464, was published at 90 Fed. Reg. 2194 on January 10, 2025 and took effect on May 12, 2025. It requires the total price up front. It also has a narrow scope: live-event tickets and short-term lodging. The FTC's own guidance is explicit about where cinemas fall: “In general, pre-recorded audio and visual performances and film screenings are not live events covered by the Rule.”

A concert ticket is covered. The film you watch afterwards is not.

Pennsylvania has no law of its own — it came close

House Bill 1216, the “Pay the Price You See” junk-fee transparency bill, passed the Pennsylvania House of Representatives on June 23, 2025 by 108 votes to 95. It has been in the Senate consumer protection committee ever since. Had it become law, this plaintiff would have had a statute that says the advertised price must be the price.

Fifteen months of a stalled bill is the whole reason this is a novel case rather than a routine one — and why its outcome is genuinely uncertain in a way the New York cases never were.

Where the price you see is already the law

New York is the outlier that matters here: its cinema cases were not brought under a junk-fee law at all, but under the Arts and Cultural Affairs Law § 25.07(4), which has been on the books for years. New York's broader Junk Fee Prevention Act passed the Senate in May 2026 and remains in an Assembly committee — it is not law.

The complaint reportedly makes the point directly: where a state requires it, AMC shows the all-in price from the start. The practice changes with the jurisdiction.

If you are here because you paid one of these fees and want money back, this table is the honest answer. All of the settlements below were real, and all of their claim deadlines have passed.

The Fandango nationwide deadline, the most recent of these, passed on August 17, 2026. If you missed it, it is worth knowing that a missed deadline does not merely cost you the payment; the release binds you anyway.

One older AMC headline still circulates and misleads: “AMC Theatres Customer Withdraws Suit Over Hidden Ticket Fees” is from April 2024 and belongs to Picciotti, not to this case. That withdrawal did not end the claims: according to the Awad settlement agreement, they were refiled the same day in Nassau County and settled as Awad.

Rodriguez v. AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc., No. 3:26-cv-01825, was filed in the District of Oregon on September 1, 2026. The docket classifies it as diversity fraud, nature of suit 370, with a jury demanded.

That is all we know. The complaint was not retrievable and we found no reporting on it. It may be about ticket fees, or about something else entirely. We are listing it because a reader tracking AMC litigation should know it exists, and not describing it because we have not read it.

Nothing to file, no case to join, no deadline. But the fee is avoidable today, which is more than a lawsuit will offer for years:

• Buy at the box office. The convenience fee is attached to the online and app purchase path. Buying in person is the one reliable way around it without paying a membership.
• Do the membership arithmetic honestly. $17.99 a year pays for itself only above a certain number of online purchases; below that, the “free” way to avoid the fee costs more than the fee.
• Screenshot the checkout if you want to be useful to a future case. The claim in every one of these lawsuits turns on what the first screen showed versus what the last screen charged, and that evidence disappears the moment you close the tab.
• If you live in one of the states listed above, the all-in price is already legally required — a fee revealed only at the end may be worth reporting to your state attorney general rather than waiting for a class action.

We will update this page when AMC's response or the next court step becomes public.