Emerging independent film company Legion M will test its crowd-funding capability to support the cinema release of a theatrical documentary on “Star Trek” icon William Shatner.
The Shatner biography, “You Can Call Me Bill,” is a PG-13 rated documentary set for March 22 theatrical release. It’s Legion M’s first time going in-house for a cinema release.
The documentary benefits from a thin industry release schedule of mainstream Hollywood films due to dislocations from the pandemic and last year’s two big Hollywood labor strikes. But lightning has struck small films in cinema recently, most notably 2023 child-exploitation drama “Sound of Freedom” that grossed a blockbuster $184 million domestically (U.S. and Canada) from Utah-based Angel Studios. The modestly budgeted “Freedom” sat on the shelf unreleased for years, finally making it to cinemas via a movie crowd-funding marketing enterprise.
Also large on Legion M’s schedule is dark comedy/drama film “My Dead Friend Zoe,” scheduled to premiere March 9 at the South By Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. The cast stars Sonequa Martin-Green and Natalie Morales, with Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris in significant roles.
“This is the second film we financed via Fan First Financing,” says Jeff Annison, who is Legion M president and co-founder. “About two-thirds of the budget was supplied by fans, with the remaining one-third supplied by professional movie investors, including (NFL star) Travis Kelce. We produced the film, and own the rights.”
In eight years, Legion M has raised $20 million in equity directly from 50,000 small investors, which is crowd funding, via nine rounds of public offerings. Those offerings were done under the federal JOBS Act benefiting small business, complete with formal prospectus documentation registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Legion M is a privately owned company.
Legion M chief Annison, who has a tech background including co-founding pioneering mobile video steaming outfit MobiTV, says the company’s equity investors average just $350, though some equity purchases are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Annison says that many investors are film festival aficionados and fanboys who frequent comic book conventions. The company first connected with Shatner via a chance meeting at a comic book gathering.
Legion M hopes to ultimately place the film in hundreds of domestic theaters and so booking efforts shift to high gear with the March 22 cinema premiere looming. “Just Call Me Bill” has no later video streaming window set following theatrical, but it’s expected after a 75-day cinema-exclusive window.
Legion M (the name refers to an ambition to eventually grow to 1 million small investors) is a small virtual company based in Hollywood and Silicon Valley with annual revenue nearing $1 million, Annison says.
The crowd funding may seem a gimmick, but being owned-by-fans propels some Legion M initiatives. For example, its investors ponied up the $750,000 production cost of the Shatner documentary in just four days. “We spent zero dollars to raise $750,000,” says Annison.
In another example of crowd clout, Annison adds that the backers of an original movie project, “Girl With No Name,” came to Legion M with only a script for what is a genre-bending, female-driven revenge story. The Legion M consumer base made a Kickstarter funding drive for a comic-book adaptation a success. “Because of that initial traction that our community can provide, we catapulted it to far more visibility,” Annison says.
“We’re doing the same thing again with our Robert Smalls project,” Annison adds. The Smalls effort again aims to marshal crowd funding to create a graphic novel. The real-life Smalls was born into slavery in the 1800s, commandeered a ship to sail with other black slaves to freedom and he was an influential politician in post-Civil War America.
Since its founding in 2016, Legion M has taken a broad approach with initiatives in stage plays, podcasting, comic books, virtual reality, film TV content, marketing entertainment, licensed merchandise and financing via both equity investment and prints-and-advertising. P&A are film release marketing costs such as advertising, trailers, creative materials and deliverables to cinemas.
Marketing services are big in the Legion M repertoire. In 2019, there was a merchandise tie-in with action/adventure film “Jay and Silent Bob Reboot” Another P&A deal providing in-kind services was for 2018 crime thriller “Bad Samaritan” for producer Dean Devlin’s Electric Entertainment. An even earlier foray was injected P&A financing into theatrical sci-fi fantasy “Colossal” starring Anne Hathaway and distributed by Neon in 2016.
Legion M has a board of advisors that are high-profile in Hollywood and marketing. They include Larry Gleason, who held senior domestic theatrical distribution jobs at three major studios; Tim League, who founded dine-in cinema chain Alamo Drafthouse; filmmaker Dean Devlin (“Independence Day” and “Stargate”); P&A marketing executive Doug Hansen; and film critic and cinema book author Leonard Maltin.
And a YouTube channel shows Shatner talking up Legion M. “It’s a novel way of making films,” Shatner says in the video. “The concept is really remarkable. … You do have sense of ownership because you do own it.”
Related content:
Leave a Reply