William Shatner in your living room?
It’s been a long time coming, but we’re excited to announce (ScreenRant broke the news this morning) that April 26th will be the VOD release date for William Shatner: You Can Call Me Bill. That’s just two weeks away! Pre-orders are available now for Apple TV and Fandango at Home (previously Vudu).
We could not be more excited to get this film out to our community. We had an AMAZING festival run, which started with the premiere at SXSW and continued with a worldwide tour to some of the most prestigious film festivals on the planet. After that, we had a groundbreaking rolling red carpet tour and theatrical release that hit over 500 screens around the country! In a day and age when most docs don’t get ANY theatrical release at all, Legion M is proud of the fact that just about everybody who wanted to see this film in a theater had a chance to do so.
And the audiences have responded! As of this writing, the documentary has an 86% rating with critics and an astounding 94% rating with audiences. That’s higher than Oppenheimer (91% audience score), which won last year’s Academy Award for best picture!
That said, the feedback we’ve consistently heard is that the primary market for docs is VOD and streaming. We don’t yet have a streaming release (i.e. Netflix, FreeVee, etc) planned, and we don’t expect that to occur until fall or winter. Until then, the ONLY way to see the film is to rent or purchase it on demand. We also plan to have a physical release (DVD and Blu-Ray) later this summer.
So please clear your calendar for the evening of Friday April 26, which is the first day the film is available. Better yet, use one the links above to pre-order a copy today. The more pre-order or purchases we get when the film opens, the better we’ll do in the rankings and algorithms. The better we do in the rankings/algorithms, the more people will get exposed to the doc. It’s a virtuous cycle! And since roughly 50% of every purchase or rental comes back in the form of revenue (after expenses have been recouped) to Legion M, buying or renting the film is one of the best things you can do to support Legion M and the investors in the documentary.
ONWARD AND UPWARD!
PS... Just as a reminder, if you pre-ordered tickets to the film and still have any unused Fandango codes, those will be converted into codes that can be used towards renting/buying the film on Fandango at Home (formerly Vudu). We will be sending out additional details on that shortly, so stay tuned!