Legion M’s co-founder and president Jeff Annison talks about the first media company in history to be owned by fans. New equity crowd-funding laws now allow people to invest as little as $100 to own a piece of the company. Legion M partners with top Hollywood creators—from independent filmmakers to big Hollywood studios—to produce a slate of movies, TV, and digital content. An entertainment company owned by fans lays the foundation for a business model with the potential to change Hollywood forever. Legion M’s long-term goal is to unite 1 million fans as shareholders of their company. This would give them hundreds of millions of dollars to develop projects, with a million people behind them when they release. In this one-on-one interview, Annison reveals his vision for Legion M, its growing fan base, and several projects completed and underway.
Why and how did you start Legion M as a fan-owned company?
Jeff Annison: It all started when a revolutionary set of laws were finally implemented in 2016 that allowed, for the first time ever, the idea of equity crowdfunding. This funding takes kick-starter one step further. Instead of just backing a project in exchange for a reward or pre-sale, you can actually buy stock in the company. And that was never possible. My co-founder and I are serial entrepreneurs. This is the third company we’ve started. When we started our first company, we initially tried to raise money, going to friends and family and saying we’re a small company, we’ve got this great idea, do you want to be part of it? It’s super high risk but a lot of people invested. But when we met with our lawyers, they said you couldn’t do that. Before these new laws passed, it was impossible for regular people to invest in a pre-IPO company. Like Facebook, every company basically starts with nothing—like a couple of people working out of a garage. Facebook grew to 100 billion dollars. From zero to $100 billion, Facebook was the exclusive domain of the wealthiest three percent of the population, allowing only these individuals to invest in the company. But when the laws changed, we were infinitely familiar with the securities aspect of it. And what we saw was this revolutionary opportunity—a company that’s owned by a legion of fans. It could be one of the most influential companies in Hollywood.
Can you talk about the Impulse Survey, which deals with log lines and trailers?
Annison: As a fan-owned company, we’re beholden to our shareholders. One of the cool things we do is to give this fan base agency over the company and the ability to direct us. Tools like Impulse and Scout, allow us to get fan feedback on a proposed project. So with Impulse, it a giant survey with a list of proposed projects complete with log lines, trailers and random questions that pertain to the projects. For example, one question we asked fans was: if we had the opportunity to work with these famous directors, which would you prefer we go with? The fans chose Kevin Smith so we felt confident that a film directed by him would do well with our fan base.
Can your registered fans submit log lines of films they want to see made?
Annison: Sometimes. The challenge with fans submitting log lines is managing the entire process—thousands of log lines—can be very difficult. So we came up with Pitch Elevator, which had a full-size elevator set on the floor of Comic-Con. You’d step into the elevator with a cameraman and a countdown timer and you had two minutes to pitch your idea. It was awesome. We captured over 400 pitches—about 10 hours worth. We then created a game that allowed our community to watch two pitches and decide which one they liked. We effectively narrowed it down to the top 30, then down to the top 10, who will be allowed to pitch their idea to a panel of industry insiders—agents and studio executives. And one of those projects will be adopted onto Legion M’s slate. With tens of thousands of people having voted on the idea, we feel more confident in the project’s success. The entire process allows our fan community to make decisions that are traditionally made by gut feel and intuition. It’s just another way we involve our shareholders in every facet of the company.
What do you look for in a project like “Mandy”?
Annison: We got involved fairly early in that unique project. We found and invested in a great artist—Panos Cosmatos, a really cool up-and-coming director. It was visually amazing.
We read the script and it was a very simple film—Nicolas Cage’s character Red Miller gets wronged and spends the rest of the movie exacting his revenge. But taking that basic story with a compelling plot line and putting it into the hands of this extremely visual director presented a really exciting opportunity. We started the Legion M Midnight label for it. We love the idea of allowing creators to work outside the box. Hollywood is so risk-averse.
Talk about “Girl With No Name.”
Annison: That’s a really exciting project. We already have a director and producer attached. What really sold us on it was the storyline and characters. It’s like “True Grit” with a protagonist more like Katniss Everdeen. She’s a badass woman who doesn’t need men to come to her rescue. The director, Tanya Wexler has this vision for shooting it in a highly visualized style—like a “300” or “Sin City.”
So what better medium to flesh that out than a comic-book based story, which we intend to release soon. The book, which is like a collection of storyboards, is being released to the backers so we can get their feedback. We’re doing three alternate covers, so when you buy the comic book, you can choose the cover you like. We’re also planning to do online development meetings where the director and producer will go online with all the people that bought the comic book and hear their feedback.
What about “Field Guide to Evil”?
Annison: We invested in that cool project about two years ago. It’s loosely based on a previous project called “The ABC’s of Death.” With “Field Guide,” the producers found eight award-winning up-and-coming film directors from around the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muxpuE1oEgU
Each film has a different cast and crew. And each 15–minute feature centers on a local myth or dark folklore in their country. Some are really scary and others a little bit silly. It’s put together as an anthology. The film just opened last night. Legion M had meet-ups and if you came, you got a free limited edition Field Guide to Evil kit.
Alex A. Kecskes is a published author of "Healer a Novel" and "The Search for Dr. Noble"—both now available on Amazon. He has written hundreds of film reviews and celebrity interviews for a wide variety of online and print outlets. He has covered red carpet premieres and Comic-Con events for major films and independent releases.
