Spiders, snakes, heights-these are commonly reported fears. Clowns rank higher than you might think. But no one mentions maintenance capital expenditures, even though the thought of them last week caused me two minutes of white-knuckle terror. I had buckled into a 99-year-old roller coaster at a 72-year-old amusement park-more on both in a moment. The park had recently changed hands, I knew, but I hadn't paid attention to the particulars.

Must be private equity, I thought, as the wooden ride, as high as a nine-story building and born a year before both penicillin and commercially sliced bread, started its noisy climb. A yield runoff, I guessed. Clack, clack. You borrow big and do a dividend recap to extract immediate value, then strip maintenance capex to juice free-cash conversion. Click. Wait a second...

I don't remember a lot of what happened next, but I'm happy to report that I suffered no physical trauma, and that it turns out the park buyer isn't a vulture at all, but rather a reputable long-term investor in weird real estate. EPR Properties owns movie theaters, golf ranges, ski parks, museums, fitness clubs, glamping sites, and more.

I call these things weird only because they don't fit into typical categories for real estate investment trusts-healthcare, apartments, warehouses, and so on. EPR prefers the term "experiential." Its shares yield 6.2% and are suddenly beating the market. One analyst who recently upgraded them sees 15% more price upside.

The park I went to is regular-weird, not just category-weird. Great Escape, not far from Lake George and the Adirondack Mountains in New York's north, started in 1954 when mechanic-turned-hotelier Charley Wood opened a Mother Goose-themed park called Storytown USA atop five acres of former marshland.

To lure older kids and adults, he gradually expanded into zippier lands and attractions. In 1989, Wood won the Comet for $210,000 at an auction of assets from a shuttered Canadian park. This 1948 coaster was built on the bones of a 1927 one so jarring and intense that its original operator had stationed a nurse at the exit platform. Wood dismantled, moved, stored, and later rebuilt the Comet, and eventually sold his park, renamed Great Escape, to a company that would become Six Flags Entertainment.

Six Flags, which merged with Cedar Fair two years ago, just unloaded some of its least-growthy parks, including Great Escape, to EPR. When you want to sell something like that, EPR is often the first call you make, and that status allows it to negotiate profitable terms.

KeyBanc Capital Markets analyst Upal Rana reckons EPR bought at a mid-8% cap rate, or yearly profit as a percentage of price, which is a point to a point-and-a-half above its likely financing costs. For a spread collector like EPR, which does "triple net" leases that put the burden of taxes, insurance, and maintenance on the tenant, terms like that add to cash flow. The tenant in this case, Enchanted Parks, is an experienced operator that is putting up ample funds for capex.

Shares of EPR, once a financing arm of AMC Entertainment Holdings, disappointed for years due largely to a movie theater downturn. So, management pivoted to collecting rents for other fun stuff, and now boasts that its theater exposure is down to about a third of the portfolio, just as the theater business is looking up. I'll come to that.

This year, the stock has returned 26%, or double the S&P 500's return. KeyBanc's Rana, who upgraded shares to Overweight from Sector Weight in late August, likes EPR's balance sheet, and the line of sight it has on years more of attractive deals.

By the way, REITs in general are outperforming this year, which is strange, but not unheard of, at a time when bond yields are rising. Valuations had started the year at attractive levels.

UBS this past week ran some numbers to determine whether the group remains cheap. Its answer: "no," based on an average dividend yield that is roughly equal to the 10-year Treasury yield, versus a historical 1.7 percentage point premium. But at the same time, "maybe," based on a price/funds-from-operations ratio for REITs that is 31% below the S&P 500's price/earnings ratio. That seems like it averages out to a "beats me," but EPR's P/FFO ratio might be a clearer call at a humble 11.

Rana also likes Broadstone Net Lease, which is into warehouses, factories, and retail space and yields 5.6%; and Getty Realty, which does convenience stores and car service stations and pays 6%.

Movie On Up

There's a new Ridley Scott movie you haven't seen, I'm guessing, called The Dog Stars. It opened last weekend to poor reviews and $8 million in domestic box office, after costing Walt Disney $80 million to make. That's a flop. But Coyote vs. Acme, which has live actors and cartoon characters, and opened to just $16 million, could make its owner money. Reviews were glowing, and Warner Bros. bailed early on the film, dumping it for $50 million to a buyer who then sold overseas rights for $20 million.

But don't let chitchat over piddling receipts mislead. The U.S. box office is trending 20% higher than last year. There have been tentpole successes like a new Spider-Man, one-off blockbusters like The Odyssey, and little films doing big numbers like Obsession, which was even scarier than maintenance capex. Demand for premium seats is high. And most importantly, Disney has Avengers movies opening in the next two Decembers. The ones in 2018 and 2019 made astonishing money.

Wedbush analyst Alicia Reese was worried. IMAX's tactic lately is that you have to shoot a movie with its cameras to get dibs on its screens. The next Avengers opens against an IMAX hog in the new Dune. But the latest Spider-Man faced the same problem with The Odyssey, and did fine. Reese is bullish on IMAX and Cinemark Holdings.