Business Update: What We're Building
It’s been seven years since Legion M burst onto the entertainment scene with our first-of-its-kind business model and we want to take a moment to reflect on what we're building together, why it matters now, and examine the great potential it has as we keep growing.
As we have stated many times, Legion M’s number one top priority has been and continues to be the growth of our community. Growth is the most critical key to our long-term success — even more important than revenue or any other metric at this phase. A large community of engaged and passionate entertainment fans is the ultimate fuel for our fly-wheel, and is so important that we even built the premise into the company's M̅ logo (the M with a bar over it is the Roman numeral for one million). This update will help explain why we are so obsessed with growth.
In the past several years, our community has grown from a small but engaged group of a few thousand investors to multiple thousands, then tens of thousands, then multiple tens of thousands to where we are today with over 40,000 and fast approaching 50,000. As one of the largest equity crowdfunding communities in the space, we are happy and proud of the success we have had, especially noting that we continued to grow through the pandemic and have been seeing signs of acceleration in the growth curve. We believe these trends could accelerate even more as we become more well known and gain access to bigger and better projects.
However, the growth of our shareholders is just one dimension of the importance of our community. The true value is derived from the engagement and meaningful impact our community has on the business and how that results in benefits to all shareholders. From the outset, our active community has been a valuable asset for Legion M, providing advantages at every stage of the process. This value goes beyond merely supporting our projects when they release, it begins at the earliest stages of the process — including discovery — where the community has the ability to help us find and discover projects like Defiant, but also to inject momentum and build grassroots support before a project is even greenlit. The impact can also extend to the very important financing and greenlighting stages, and continue all the way into helping achieve a buzzworthy and successful release. Meaningful engagement and impact in all three of these stages — discovery, financing, and release — makes Legion M a burgeoning triple threat in the entertainment industry.
As evidenced by the examples and data below, the measurable impact that our community has on our projects at different stages is not only significant today, but more importantly, when used as a tool for projecting the potential impact as our community expands, reveals some incredibly exciting visions of what we could achieve at scale.
The Power To Inject Early Momentum Into A Project
Let’s start at the beginning of a project before it goes into production. In late 2019 we produced a comic book title for a film we are producing titled Girl With No Name. At the time we had about 16K investors . Leaning primarily on our community for presales of the comic, we were able to generate over $130K making it one of the most backed single comic books in Kickstarter history. Not only did this provide a nice influx of revenue to the company and help offset our development expenses, but it was a fantastic example of how the power of our community added value and momentum to the film project, giving new life to the financing prospects for the film itself.
Today, we have nearly 3x as many investors which could reasonably suggest the potential for increased revenue, if revenue were to increase linearly with the growth, a single comic book from Legion M could potentially generate hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Looking ahead and extrapolating to if/when we reach our goal of one million investors, our community would be 62.5 times bigger than when we did the Girl With No Name book. Scaling the numbers linearly could result in millions of dollars in pre-sales for a book like this which could literally lead to a potential bestseller and one of the top-selling comic books in the country. However, it is important to note that it remains to be seen if our growth will scale linearly or just increase substantially. Either way, this is all still very good news for Legion M.
The Power To Independently Finance And Greenlight A Project
While it is never expected and always optional, in our survey outreach, many of our Legion M shareholders expressed a strong interest in making direct investments into specific projects as a compliment to their Legion M investment and with the goal of achieving shorter-term ROI.
In June of 2021 we did an early experiment with direct investments into a Legion M project with our partnership with OneDoor Studios, and invited our community to invest directly into the development of the feature film script for Calculated. At that time, we had about 30K investors and with a few emails and social posts, we were able to raise over $500K from our community for the Calculated project in just a few short weeks.
Fast forward to this year where we did another experiment with direct investments, this time to fully finance our William Shatner documentary, You Can Call Me Bill, with our innovative Fan-First Financing Structure. With 40K investors we were able to raise more than $800K (including the wait list) in just a matter of days and likely would have raised north of $1M if we had kept the round open and offered it beyond the initial group of reservation holders. The offering sold out before we got the chance to issue the press release announcing the round was open or Bill was able to tweet to his 2.5MM twitter followers. Soon after raising this capital we announced the film had been accepted to the prestigious SXSW festival for its world premiere, where it received great reviews (the film is currently 100% on Rotten Tomatoes with 10 critical reviews). As we now enter the monetization phase, we expect this project will provide income to the film’s investors and Legion M for years to come.
Using these two examples and doing some simple math again to extrapolate to one million investors, the numbers if scaled linearly are truly spectacular. At one million investors, Legion M would be 25 times the size we were when we did You Can Call Me Bill and 33 times the size we were when we did Calculated. If we scale those numbers and are able to maintain engagement, it’s not hard to imagine Legion M having the capability to greenlight projects (with budgets of tens of millions of dollars) with just a few emails.
The Power To Drive Revenue And Monetize Our Projects
Let’s keep going into the prime stage of impact — when we release a project. In 2018 we introduced a Legion M project titled Mandy with a day and date release via RLJ. For those that know the industry, a day and date release is typically released in just a handful of theaters with a minimal amount of marketing (if any at all). Being in theaters is primarily a way of helping drive the premium rental price for VOD. At the time we released Mandy, Legion M had about 8K investors and with our community driving the majority of the marketing and grassroots awareness for the film, we quite literally blew away all expectations, ultimately driving over $1.2M in box office alone (Read: Surprise Theatrical Success of Mandy). We can’t take credit for all the revenue, but we know we played a massive role in helping it reach its breakout success and we have continued to drive revenues for that project ever since.
Fast forward to this year, Legion M has grown to over 40K investors and recently teamed up with Fathom Events to bring The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King back to theaters. Again, the results were way beyond the early expectations, driving over $1.2M in box office in the first night alone, out-performing movies like Air, Renfield and The Pope’s Exorcist despite the fact those films were on 2-3X the number of screens. Now granted, The Lord of the Rings is a big franchise with a large fan base so we can’t take all the credit, but the film did not get a lot of marketing support beyond what Legion M and Fathom Events did and it is a 20 year old movie, readily available on streaming, Blu-ray, and DVD, so we believe a substantial part of the success is coming from the engagement and awareness made possible with our community.
Using these two examples and extrapolating out to one million investors, Legion M would be 125 times the size we were for Mandy and 25 times the size were for the Fathom Events release. With this in mind and again, assuming the numbers scale, one could imagine a scenario where the Legion M community could help drive up to $25-100M in box office for just one project.
Looking ahead, it's clear that the Legion M community will only continue to grow and become even more impactful. As the entertainment industry evolves, the importance of having a passionate and engaged community adding value at every stage of a project just simply cannot be overstated.
Our dedication to growth and excitement for the future stems from the fact that each new investor milestone we achieve unlocks new potential and widens the gap between us and the competition. With 50K investors in our sights and 100K up soon after, we are honing our ability to make books best-sellers or to flash-fund films without any dependence on others, and then to drive substantial revenue through the power of our own community — this is what we are building and why we believe Legion M has the potential to be one of the most influential companies in Hollywood.
Onward & Upward!
Help Legion M grow by sharing our Round 9 details with any entertainment fans you know, or by forwarding this email to them. Together we can put a Legion M-sized dent in the universe!
Read the Offering Circular and risks related to Legion M’s offering before investing. This Reg A+ offering is made available through StartEngine Primary, LLC, member FINRA/SIPC. These investments are speculative, illiquid, and involve a high degree of risk, including the possible loss of your entire investment. You should never invest more than you can afford to lose in Legion M (or any equity crowdfunding offering).
This email may contain forward-looking statements and information relating to, among other things, the company, its business plan and strategy, and its industry. These forward-looking statements are based on the beliefs of, assumptions made by, and information currently available to the company’s management. When used in the offering materials, the words “estimate,” “project,” “believe,” “anticipate,” “intend,” “expect” and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements, which constitute forward looking statements. These statements reflect management’s current views with respect to future events and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause the company’s actual results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date on which they are made. The company does not undertake any obligation to revise or update these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after such date or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events.