Meme Stock Investors Derail Wall Street Bets on AMC Legal Fight

It would have been a pretty standard corporate dispute for Wall Street to bet on, if it weren’t for the meme stock crowd.

A court’s approval of an AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. stock conversion plan last week ended a long legal tug-of-war between the movie theater chain and a small army of retail investors, who fiercely opposed the plan and helped delay it by months.

The involvement of these investors, who turned beaten-down stocks like AMC and GameStop Corp. into viral memes and winners for a time, injected extra uncertainty into the situation. And it gave Wall Street traders — ...