Business Update: Mandy Anniversary Re-Release!

Instagram user @victormoreno at the Alamo Drafthouse Phoenix with free Cheddar Goblin Mac & Cheese courtesy of Legion M!

This past weekend marked an exciting first for Legion M — the 2 year anniversary re-release of Mandy. This was notable in that was the first time in our history that Legion M had directly booked theaters for showings of one of our films.

It’s kind of a crazy if you think about it — while anniversary re-releases are common (especially now because of the lack of new movies), anniversary re-releases for two-year old day-and-date films (industry jargon for movies that come out on-demand the exact time they comes out in theaters) are pretty much non-existent. I suppose we can just add that to the list of ways that Mandy defies convention...

Going in, we were enthusiastic about the idea of an anniversary re-release as it seemed like a fun, Legion M thing to do. That said, we also recognized the challenges of creating a theatrical event in the midst of a pandemic. We were determined to do it safely, which meant focusing on drive-ins and theaters that were taking COVID seriously. Ultimately, we ended up booking 29 drive-ins and independent theaters (including 16 Alamo Drafthouses) around the country.

As the dust settles after the screenings, the results are very encouraging. According to Box Office Mojo, Mandy was the #19 (of 42) overall release last weekend based on gross ticket sales. While that ranking may not seem very impressive, if you consider the limited number of theaters we were in (29) and the fact that most theaters only had ONE-SHOWING (on a Thursday night, no less!), the fact that we were #19 in the country is downright remarkable.

In fact, if you sort results by the average revenue per screen (one of the key metrics for theatrical releases), you can see that Mandy was the #3 movie in the country -- even though most of our screens only had one showing the entire weekend! It’s fair to say that if we’d had a full weekend of screenings, we would have had a real shot at being the #2 or even #1 film in the nation for per-screen-average.

So what does all this mean for Legion M? In the short term it means a little additional revenue for 2020, a little additional exposure for the company, and a little more notoriety for the film. In the long term, it’s a successful experiment that gained us a LOT of learnings about how to put a film into theaters. As a fan-owned company, we LOVE the idea of bringing our community together like this. And while that’s difficult now because of the pandemic, experiments like Mandy give us experience, knowledge, and confidence in our ability to successfully manage more events like this in the future!!