A first earnings call, a 27% margin, and 425,000 reasons to bring back Christmas
John Reilly’s first earnings call as Six Flags CEO painted a picture of a chain operating without consistent accountability or shared standards across its 26 parks.
Reilly’s predecessor, Richard Zimmerman, laid out an ambitious turnaround under the banner of “The Great Reset,” with specific targets of 58 million in attendance and $3.8 billion in revenue by 2028. During the earnings call, we saw the complete opposite; attendance and revenue had declined. So, when Reilly said “the underlying demand is there, and the biggest value creation opportunity is through better execution,” the natural reaction from anyone paying attention is: we’ve heard this before.
Reilly, so far, is doing things differently by gathering buy-in rather than issuing top-down mandates. Whether that translates into results is still completely open, but the approach is at least encouraging. And some of what he found on his listening tour (we’ll get that below) is genuinely surprising.
“the biggest value creation opportunity is through better execution”
The Numbers
Full year 2025:
Net revenues: $3.10 billion
Attendance: 47.4 million guests
Per capita spending: $61.90
Admissions per capita: $33.41
In-park product per capita: $28.49
Adjusted EBITDA: $792 million
Modified EBITDA margin: 27.1%, down from 33.2% in 2024
Net loss: $1.6 billion (includes $1.518 billion non-cash goodwill impairment, up from $42 million in 2024)
Operating days: 5,738
Q4 2025:
Net revenues: $650 million, down 5% vs. Q4 2024 (up 7% on a per-operating-day basis)
Attendance: 9.3 million, down 13% (down 2% on a per-operating-day basis)
Per capita spending: $66.41, up 8% vs. $61.60 in Q4 2024
Admissions per capita: $35.32, up 5%
In-park product per capita: $31.10, up 11%
Adjusted EBITDA: $165 million, down from $209 million
Operating days: 779, down from 878
On per capita spending: the increase was driven by higher guest spending on food and beverage, merchandise, and extra-charge products such as Fast Lane and Flash Pass. Six Flags credited continued investments in food and beverage upgrades and higher demand for premium experiences. That $61.90 full-year per-cap is still low relative to premium destination parks, which reported per-capita revenue above $80 in 2025, and well below the major parks. The per-cap also spans 26 parks in very different markets, which limits how much you can read into the chain-wide number.
The number that drew the most attention on the call was the Modified EBITDA margin. UBS analyst Arpine Kocharyan pressed Reilly directly on it. His response: “I do not have a timeline today to get to a specific target. But as I said before, 27% gives us a mandate. The work is underway. We believe there is considerable opportunity over time.”
The Listening Tour
Reilly has implemented a new feedback pipeline across the parks and has toured 14 parks so far during his listening tour. “So far, we have received more than 300 proposals from our parks alone, recommending projects to create efficiencies and automate workflows,” he said. He described these as coming directly from frontline staff, undergoing vetting before being evaluated for company-wide rollout. “The best ideas and highest-return innovations come from the people closest to the work.”
On the call, he shared specific examples organized around a few themes:
Ride operations and maintenance: “We expect to see significantly increased ride uptime and throughput at Magic Mountain and at other parks.” He described visiting Kings Island, where “our maintenance team shared their idea how we could save thousands by purchasing certain equipment we are currently renting. I can assure you this is something we are digging into further.” Specific examples: “We have a suggestion from Magic Mountain where they are renting an air compressor for $32,000 a year. It will cost us $35,000 to buy one and take that rental out of the P&L forever. At Knott’s Berry Farm, it will cost them $14,000 to buy a forklift that we can capitalize. It costs us $19,000 a year to rent it.”
Food and beverage: “We have placed executive chefs in the park to elevate food quality and improve guest satisfaction.” He described touring Carowinds, where “Eraj, our executive chef there, showed me how innovations are expanding the park’s menu offering this year, and he and his team explained how they are more efficiently approaching food preparation during varying demand levels, with monitored holding times to ensure guests are getting the freshest and best-quality food.” Reilly said chef placements have been fully deployed across the parks.
Automation and guest flow: “Parking lots, automated entry at tolls, other things — those can actually improve the guest experience while creating efficiency. There are a lot of studies that show that guests actually prefer that type of frictionless entry.”
These are excellent practical ideas, but they simultaneously raise a question: why wasn’t this already happening? The frontline teams knew. What the examples reveal is a communication and standards gap across 26 parks – two formerly competing companies that merged on paper but never fully unified how they share information or make operational decisions. Reilly said, “The issues are not systemic. The issues are market by market, park by park.” He may be right in a narrow sense, but when the same kinds of inefficiencies keep showing up across different parks, at some point, the pattern is the system.
Rethinking Seasonal Events
Portfolio Consolidation
Where This Leaves Things
There are reasons to be encouraged and reasons to be skeptical, and they’re mostly the same reasons.
It’s encouraging that Reilly is touring parks, talking to frontline staff, and surfacing fixable problems. The ride uptime improvements, the chef placements, the equipment purchasing, the feedback pipeline — these are all things that should improve operations. The fact that he’s building buy-in from the people who run the parks every day is meaningfully different from a top-down mandate.
It’s discouraging that these problems existed at all, and that the previous CEO’s plan didn’t fix them. Zimmerman’s Great Reset laid out specific targets, and the company moved further from those goals, not closer. Therefore, a good plan wasn’t enough.
Then, there’s the goodwill impairment. A jump from $42 million to $1.518 billion in a single year is a balance sheet that acknowledges the merger has so far destroyed value rather than created it. Two companies merged on paper, but the operational integration never fully happened. In that respect, one could argue that Reilly’s immediate approach of gathering feedback and empowering front-line staff members could be the exact antidote needed to address the failure of Zimmerman’s plan.
That may be the most important question going forward: can Reilly fully realize the merger? If 26 (or less depending on which parks get sold) parks across two legacy companies begin operating as a single organization with shared standards, accountability, and a feedback loop that actually works, that would be impressive. Reilly has only been here two months, and he hasn’t even presented a plan yet. But the margin, the debt, and the balance sheet won’t wait forever. We’ve seen what happens when good intentions don’t translate into execution.
