Six Flags Q4 Earnings: A New CEO, a 27% Margin, $5.1B in Debt, and a Lot of Obvious Ideas

Six Flags posted Q4 2025 results this week. Modified EBITDA margin fell from 33.2% to 27.1%. Attendance dropped 13%, with roughly 425,000 of those lost visits tied directly to cutting winter holiday events at four parks — a decision the company now calls a self-inflicted headwind. New CEO John Reilly is two months into the job and was candid about not yet having a full plan. He's toured 14 parks, collected over 300 employee proposals, and shared examples from his listening tour: increasing ride uptime and throughput, placing executive chefs in parks, and buying equipment the chain has been renting at a loss for years. All good ideas. All things that probably should have been happening already. What the examples reveal is a deeper structural problem with how information and decisions have flowed across 26 parks — and whether the merger made that worse. Reilly deserves time. But the margin, the debt, and the parks that barely contribute to EBITDA aren't going to wait forever. Listen to weekly BONUS episodes on our Patreon.