Legion M, the very first fan owned entertainment company, has taken Hollywood by storm over the last few years. With some very ground breaking legislative changes, Paul Scanlan and Jeff Annison were able to bring their dream to life. Over the last two and half years, Legion M has had a hand in movies, TV, VR projects and have so much more coming in on the horizon.
On the eve of their fourth investment round, I got to sit down and chat with Jeff Annison, the co founder and President of Legion M, about what investors can expect, some future projects, and where we see the company going over the next few years. He is a fantastic person with a lot of passion for not only the industry but for the fans as can see how truly powerful we can be. Not to mention, in five minutes he was able to explain the JOBS Act better than any of the other legalese I have sifted through!
Related: LEGION M Is Allowing Fans to Invest in Upcoming Film, TV and VR Projects
Interview
Julia Roth: Back in 2016, you and Paul Scanlan founded Legion M. What was the story behind all of this? How did this all come to be?
Jeff Annison: That is a great question, it was really precipitated by the JOBS Act. Are you familiar with the JOBS Act at all?
JR: I have read up on it.
JA: Okay, so yeah it was some pretty landmark legislation in the world of securities right that for the first time it enabled regular people to invest in startup companies. Prior to the JOBS Act the only people who were allowed to invest in startups were what are called accredited investors. There is a whole definition for that but effectively translates to the wealthiest 3% of the population. So what that meant is even if you were best friends with Mark Zuckerberg when he was starting Facebook, and he came to you and said ‘Hey man I am raising money for my new company’ and you were like ‘Oh my gosh this sounds amazing, I’d like to put in a little bit of money’. Unless you were one of the wealthiest 3% of Americans you were actually forbidden from doing so by Securities law. The laws were set up, these were consumer protections, that were created back in the 1930s to protect at that time, small town America from being wiped out and their investment savings wiped out by carpetbaggers and that sort of thing.
Back then the SEC figured that people who were already wealthy had access information that wasn’t available to people who were just on the street. If anything were to ever go wrong, the wealthy would be more equipped to lose their money and speculate high risk investments. They passed these laws and now 80, 90 years later we live in a world where I have access more information on my smartphone than JD Rockefeller had back in his day and probably his entire lifetime. The SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) finally caught up with the times and passed this legislation and now for the first time in history anybody has the opportunity to invest in startup companies and the reason that that’s important is because if you look at companies like Facebook for example, it is a wonderful example, if you had bought in at the IPO of Facebook and invested say $100 or $500 or how much you wanted to invest and held it until today, I think you are looking at a 4x gain over the past, I think they IPO in 2012, so 6 years which is pretty phenomenal in regards to stock returns and investment returns. However if you flash backwards and say you could have invested when Mark Zuckerberg was looking for money and the very first investors were getting into Facebook, those people had a return that was more like 2000x or 3000x in return. This whole world of startups is where venture capitalists and angel investors and people like Peter Thiel make their fortunes which is completely blocked off from main street America. That is what fundamentally changed with the JOBS Act.
And that is way more than what you ever wanted to know about Securities Law and not sure why I went off on such a deep tangent there, but when that law passed and now for the first time people have to opportunity to invest. We saw an opportunity to create a company, a new sort of company that was owned by fans. The whole idea is that if you have an entertainment company that is owned by a passionate audience of entertainment fans, you have a huge competitive advantage when your movies come out because you know that your investors and all your shareholders are going to be there. They are going to come out and see if opening night which is the most important time to see it. They are going to bring their friends, they are going to be talking about it on social media because they are a part of that movie. We think that the JOBS Act basically created a once in a lifetime opportunity by changing these Securities laws that have been on the books for 80 years and made it possible to create a company like Legion M.
JR: That is awesome! Now you guys are entering your fourth investing round. How are these investments different than say someone buying stock in their favorite entertainment company?
JA: Great question! First of all, like you said we are entering our fourth round. Everything that we do is regulated by the SEC and so for example we have to do public filings of all our audited financial reports. You can look online and see the filing for this fourth round, we had to submit a sixty page document to the SEC with probably about 300 pages of addendum and charts for financial reports and all of that sort of stuff. It just goes through excruciating detail what are plans and how we are going to spend the money and how we have spent the money in the past, what our salaries are and who are shareholders are. It is very buttoned up and very detailed and we have to do that as part of the JOBS Act before we can go out and raise money from people. So we only raise money in these discrete rounds, this is the fourth one and we are going on a three year history. We are about two and a half to two in three quarter years old and this is the fourth time we are opening a round. Two out of the last three have sold out so it is an important time for us as a company is when we can bring new people into the Legion.
As far as your other question, which was how does this different from say buying stock in Walt Disney, which is a great question. The fact is that as a fan you can go buy a share of Disney or shares of Disney but you wouldn’t say that Disney is a fan owned company because the number of fans that go and buy shares of Disney is diminishingly small compared to the Wall Street investors or the hedge funds and retirement funds. Disney is a company that is owned by Wall Street and every other entertainment company in the world is owned by Wall Street and corporate investors or owned by a small group of wealthy individuals as a privately owned company. That is because, like I said earlier, it was never possible to build a company that was designed from the ground up to be owned by fans. While you can go invest in Disney and you own shares in Disney, you don’t get to vote or have any kind of say on what projects Disney is going to do. They don’t allow their shareholders to come behind the scenes and see the creation of these or do the live streams with the producers or that sort of thing. Because we are owned by fans, we architected everything we do to try and give you, as one of our shareholders, not just a financial return but also an emotional return and an opportunity to be apart of what we are doing.
The biggest part of it is that Disney is a company that is owned by Wall Street and Legion M is a company that is owned by fans. The other part of it though is that Disney is a mature company, like that Facebook example that I gave, Disney is one of the titans of Wall Street. They are one of the most valuable companies in the world so when you invest in them you can hope that the stock is going to go up but you are playing in the realm of Facebook after its IPO where in the last six years it has gone up 4x. Where as with Legion M you are buying into a startup company. So Legion M is equivalent of going back in time and investing in Disney when it was just Walt (Disney) and Roy (Disney). As you can imagine as an investor, when you invest in those very early stages it is a much higher risk. Right the odds of us going out of business versus the odds of Disney going out of business, like there is no question. Disney is a much much much safer bet. However if we are successful and we think this could change the world. If we are successful your potential return, like investing back when it was just Walt and Roy, is astronomically higher. It is really a high risk high reward investment as opposed to Disney which a relatively safe but with that much lower potential for return. Does that answer you question?
Related: LACC 2018: Legion M’s Terri Lubaroff Gets Disruptive
JR: It definitely does. I just hope that you guys never close, I am just going to put that out there.
JA: That makes two of us, actually that makes 11,000 of us now.
JR: Oh yeah it definitely does!
JA: With over 10,000 investors in Legion M, we are swinging for the fences with this, our logo is an M with a bar over it. It is the roman numeral for one million because our long term goal is to unite one million fans as shareholders of the company. We believe that it’s going to be really difficult, like that is really hard and no one has done anything like this before and to go out and say that this is what we are trying to do is audacious. But you know as you can imagine if we are successful, even if we are part way successful as a fan owned company. The minimum investment, if you want to invest, is $100 and the average across all of our 10,000 or 11,000 investors is like $500. So you can see that if we are able to achieve this one million shareholder milestone, you are looking that at a company that has hundreds of millions of dollars to develop movies and TV shows and entertainment projects that have one million people standing behind them when those projects release. That company, we believe could be one of the most influential companies in Hollywood. So that is ultimately what we are gunning for and that what are architecting everything for and that is what we are shooting for. We are also very careful to tell people, look we are a startup company and the fact is most startup companies fail. That is just a fact of life and we don’t want anybody coming in with misconceptions. This is not a place for your retirement savings or your college fund, no this is your, ‘I’m gonna take a risk here and if it pays off that is great and it is going to be amazing but if it doesn’t pay off, I won’t be that distraught and it isn’t going to hurt me.’
JR: I did see that it is just $100 to get in, which is pretty reasonable for a large portion of investors. If you think about it, $100 is a couple Starbucks coffees that you can skip.
JA: You are absolutely right and we purposely made that cost of entry very low, frankly as low as we were allowed to with the funding platform we are working in, specifically because we wanted it to be something that was accessible. Part of our goal is we want to open the gates of Hollywood. Hollywood as a role has been a very closed off arena, a closed off industry, a velvet rope sort of industry and typically fans are on the outside. What we are really trying to do is open the gates of Hollywood to allow people to come in and own a piece of it and what is great about it, like I said earlier, we are not doing this because it is a really fun idea, even though it is and it is awesome and it is so fun for us and for all of our shareholders to be able to connect with the creators and go behind the scenes and all that sort of stuff is really fun.
But the great thing about it is that it is really really really good business because the business model behind Legion M is that as an investor in the company you are financially invested in the success of this movie and because of the fact that you had a chance to engage with the creators and you saw it when we first picked up the script and you have been following it all along, you are emotionally invested in the movie. So when that movie comes out, that is when you are going to go all out and be genuinely excited and talk to your friends about it and not because you are some corporate schill that has to go sell this but because you are genuinely excited because you have been apart of this movie since day one. That is not only immensely rewarding for the shareholder to be apart of it but it is so powerful for the movie. What effectively happens is that Legion M becomes this giant grass roots network that is able to create a sort of buzz that frankly a studio would kill for but money can’t buy. We think it is an incredible competitive advantage, like I said it is good fun but even more than that it is a really smart business model.
JR: We saw this with Mandy because when they initially released it, it was in a few select theaters and it went right to being able to be downloaded from iTunes and they went back and added more theaters because there was the need to go out and see it and be a part of that.
JA: You are absolutely right. We don’t take credit for Mandy, it is an amazing film, Panos and everybody and all the creative team and producers, everybody who put their heart and soul into it created a really special piece of art. So I don’t think we get any credit for that and zero credit for the creative output and the piece of art that Mandy is. Where Legion M can take credit and where I think we did contribute significantly to Mandy is getting it out in front of people and helping break through the wall. As you said there is a Business Insider article that came out a few weeks ago, maybe a month ago, that talks about how Mandy has literally redefined how people look at day and date releases. Day and date releases is when, like Mandy, the movie comes out in theaters the same day that it comes out on demand. When they do that, typically the fact that it is available in theaters is just in a sense almost like marketing for the film, the fact that it is out in theaters. It usually starts in a very select number of theaters and goes down very rapidly. But for Mandy because there was this grass roots buzz they actually had to add more theaters and there are still theaters that are doing midnight showings of it. The way that we would like to kind of describe it is, Legion M can’t make a bad movie good. Getting more awareness of a bad movie isn’t going to make it any better but we can take a good movie and help it become a hit. I think that is kind of what we have done with Mandy, how we have contributed is that by having Legion M involved might be the difference between Mandy being some hidden gem that has a very small group of people who say ‘Wow I saw this movie and I really loved it I can’t believe you haven’t heard of it’ versus something that is on it’s way to becoming a cult classic.
JR: Now for people who have invested in previous rounds, are they forever an investor or do they have to reinvest each time? Can they choose to invest more money than they did initially?
JA: Yeah that is a great question. Like I said, the best analogy to use is like if you invested in Disney back when it was just Walt and Roy, you still own that stock, you never have to reinvest. Every round that we do, every time we bring on people the percentage of the company that you own gets smaller and smaller and smaller but hopefully the overall value gets larger and larger. Essentially you are owning a smaller piece of a larger pie. If you look at the price of the shares when we started off in the very first round, the price was $7 per share. The price in this fourth round is $8.88 per share, so it is kind of steadily rising over the four rounds. Our goal is obviously to grow that by 10x or 100x or something like that. It is still very early and we are in the bottom of the second inning if you were to kind of compare this to a baseball game. We have a long way to go before we succeed. But once you own stock in the company, you own it until you sell it or give it away to a friend or transfer it as a gift or something like that.
You can always come back in and buy more and actually a fairly significant portion of our Legion M investors are people who bought in in the first round. Back then, the people who bought in during the first round were really going out on a limb because at that point we hadn’t done anything. Like literally we were just two guys standing up saying ‘hey we think this is a great idea’ and fortunately there were enough people that saw that vision and said ‘hey this is something I can get behind’ that fueled our first round which ended up selling out and when we came back for our second round we had our first movie out which was Colossal which was an Anne Hathaway movie. We didn’t produce that movie but we invested in that movie and we were able to show people that yeah this is what Legion M is all about. It is more than just an idea, we can actually act on it. We did a virtual reality project with Stan Lee and Kevin Smith. Now when you look back as we open up our fourth round, we did Colossal with Anne Hathaway, we did Bad Samaritan with David Tennant which was a Dean Devlin movie, the guy that created Stargate, Independence Day with Will Smith and Leverage and The Librarians that are two great TV shows and has since joined the Legion on the board of advisers.
We just made recent announcements about Girl With No Name and Evermor, which are projects that we are developing internally. Half of the projects that we have done so far are where we are investing in someone else’s project like Colossal or Mandy. The other half of our slate of projects that we are developing ourselves, like Girl With No Name and Evermor, those are a much longer lead time, they will probably be years before Girl With No Name hits the big screen and there is a lot of risk that as whether it can or not. The point is that it is a very diversified slate and the people that are investing now have a lot more to go by and we have demonstrated that even though we only have 10,000 people in the Legion so far, I think we have demonstrated enough to give real evidence that if this thing continues to grow and the larger we get the more powerful we become, I think that honestly it would not be long before we can be unstoppable.
JR: This is awesome. Now how do your investors help decide which projects Legion M works towards or which ones they pass on?
JA: This is a question that we get alot, it is funny because we have some people that are like ‘oh my gosh this is just like any other entertainment company and you don’t have a vote in it and it is blah blah blah’ and then on the other side we get the opposite reaction which goes ‘this is a nightmare, to many chefs spoil the stew, it doesn’t make sense and you can’t get fans to agree on anything’. People kind of look at it sometimes from both of those angles. There is some truth to them because the fact is, selecting projects is a very tricky sort of thing. What we try and do is involve our shareholders in the selection process as much as possible and there is two reasons for this. One is that we want to give you, the shareholder, a say and you know a vote sometimes in the direction that the company is taking, after all you are a part owner in this company. This company exists to serve you as a shareholder and we think it is very fitting that you should have some say in the course that it is taking. But on top of that there is also the other thing, when it comes to selecting projects at a traditional entertainment company, those decisions are usually made by a single person or a small group of people on a committee. When you are making content decisions like that you are relying almost exclusively on your intuition, on your gut feel and on your experience. If you are doing it in a committee you have to deal with all the social dynamics of the different people that are responsible for making that decision.
That is great and a lot of companies are successful but at the end of the day it comes down to gut feeling and intuition. We think that we have this super power, which is that fact that we got a Legion of people who are invested in the company that we can act upon and leverage the wisdom of the crowd, so it is not me arguing with Paul whether this is a good fit for Legion M, we can turn and we have actual data to say ‘wow people are really excited about this, maybe this is something we should be looking a little bit more closely at’. We have this thing calls M-Pulse, it is designed to come out every month or two, and in that we will put questions like what did you think of Mandy, for example to get more feedback on the stuff that we have already done. We will also show you trailers for projects some of which are people we are talking to and others are people who have absolutely no relation to the Legion and never will, but we just kind of want to get your feedback on it. People will go in and rate and evaluate those trailers. We will put loglines in there which are short description of movies and again a lot of them are made up or random, but again some of those sprinkled in are actual projects that we are looking at. We have got this amazing resource that polls some of the most passionate fans on the planet that we can go to and gleam their wisdom and get data from them. That is how we work the Legion and leverage the Legion into making better decisions for the company, enable our shareholders to have a say in the direction where we are going.
With that said, we also want to point out that you don’t make great art by committee. The Legion is, in addition to the artistic side, like if we go out to a Legion of people and show them two trailers they are very well equipped to say this looks like a great movie and this one does not. But when it comes to the business of Hollywood, which is, which of these two movies has the best likelihood of making money or which one has more risk or who are the people associated with those projects and are they people we want to be in business with. Those sorts of questions, the crowd is very ill-equipped to provide feedback on, so balancing out the wisdom of the crowd is what we would call the wisdom of our advisory board. We have compiled an amazing advisory board and we’ve got 15 or 20 people including executives from Netflix, Sony, Alamo and Neon and people who have been working for decades in the industry and demonstrated success. Every decision that we make is really kind of a synthesis of using the Legion to filter down and figure out which projects we should be focusing on and then using our advisers to navigate Hollywood and make sure we are making smart investment decisions and that we are working with the sort of people we want to work with.
JR: I want to touch on the Girl With No Name because I was at NYCC when they made all those announcements this past year. Do your investors have a say in kind of like the path you are going down? It isn’t just going to be a film, it will also include a comic that will come out prior to film.
Related: NYCC 2018: Interview – Legion M’s Terri Lubaroff on GIRL WITH NO NAME
JA: We did not ask investors permission prior to doing that and again a lot of the stuff is not explicit where we put stuff out for vote and say ‘hey should we do x or y?’ That said, we wouldn’t have done this if we did not think that it would be well received within the Legion. We are always talking to the Legion, we have a members only Facebook group where myself and all the other executives are pretty active and we are always listening to people and engaging with folks there. We do a lot of events like Comic Cons and film festivals and we really work hard to keep in tune with what the Legion is looking for. With that one we decided to do a comic book and we thought that it would be very well received in the Legion and we will find out if we are right or not. If we are not, we are never going to do it again but if it goes well then this is a good pattern for us because the whole idea of the Girl With No Name is that it started with a script right and it is a cool script with a wonderful director and producer attached to it that we really wanted to work with and they have a very exciting vision for what this film is. That is a really cool starting point, but to be perfectly blunt there is probably a hundred thousand other scripts in Hollywood which have cool producers and directors already attached to them.
So the question is how do you separate yourself from the noise. How do you make your movie or get your movie made and how do you ultimately make it successful? What we liked about the idea of doing a comic book was really two things. First of all it allows us to start to build a fan base and build buzz and momentum for it. When this comic book comes out, we have got some cool plans that will kick off around, after the first of the year so early 2019 around Girl With No Name. Again they are explicitly designed to get introduced to the characters and introduced to the story and get people talking about. That is really powerful because then as we go and approach talent and actors and say ‘hey we would love to have you involved with this project’ you have got something more than just a script and a director and producer. You will also have an established fan base. Anytime that you can do that it helps your prospects or your project to succeed.
The other part of it is, and I think it is really cool and more of a Silicon Valley mindset and less of a Hollywood mindset is the director has a very distinct vision for the feel of this movie. The story is a Western with a protagonist as a young girl similar to maybe True Grit, if you kind of think of that as the sort of story that it is. However she wants to do it in a heavily stylized version, if you could sort of think of 300 or even Sin City. Sin City is pretty far up the spectrum as far as stylization, but she has got this vision of creating this young woman as a new Katniss Everdeen or a Ripley from Aliens in this highly stylized story that just happens to take place in the 1860s in the American West. It is a really unique sort of vision that never really, I can’t think of a movie that has been done before like that. She loved the idea of doing a comic book as a way to start to flush out the stylization and the visualization. The opportunity to work and start to develop that style in a medium such as a comic book is much less expensive than jumping in and doing it straight in the film itself. I think it is actually really powerful it’s a great way for her and for us to flush things out and develop it, which I think ultimately gives the film an even better chance of being successful. Like I said it is kind of like that startup company Silicon Valley sort of methodology where it is not about going to market immediately with your final product, which if you think about it that is what most movies are. Most movies, everyone is kind of like into the script and they go off and spend the budget which is like sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars and then the movie comes out. You get one shot and if you are right the movie will be amazing and if you’re wrong then tough luck all the time and money was wasted and you turn around and start talking about your next project. I think it is very rare that somebody has the opportunity to say ‘you know that before we spend this giant wad of money creating a movie, why don’t we flush things out a little bit with like a comic book’. I think it is a really cool sort of opportunity and one that we’re excited to working with.
JR: For your in-house projects like Icons and Evermor, Icons is specifically for VR correct?
JA: Yes, correct.
JR: But for Evermor and a few of the other ones, do you have plans to have them on Netflix or where are we going to be able to watch them when they finally come out?
JA: I would say that our slate is a very broad mixture of everything from you know reality television to scripted feature films and literally everything in between. Evermor is specifically designed to be a one hour family friendly science fiction show that would be perfect for Netflix or Amazon or potentially cable network like FX, or SyFy I should say. Where it ends up is the whole process for us, we would love to get it on Netflix. We think it would be an amazing product for Netflix. We would love to have a Legion M project on Netflix that all of us could tune in and watch. We would love to have something on cable network like HBO where we can tune in each week and watch our Legion M show together. I think that would be really powerful but you know this is all the art and business of making things happen in Hollywood. We are working very hard right now to flush out that show Evermor and we just announced at LA Comic Con two weeks ago that Andrew Cosby, creator of Eureka, has joined us as the show-runner on that show. So that is an exciting development for us and Andrew is a great guy who has done a ton in Hollywood, he wrote the Hellboy reboot that is coming out next year. He is a guy that again is one of our advisers, he is a guy that understands Hollywood, he is now signed on to do this project with us. Other the next probably three to four months, our lives is trying to take what we got, which is the script and a show-runner and some art and momentum within the Legion and take that to Netflix and pitch it and see if they will pick it up. Take it to Amazon and pitch them, take it everywhere and see where we can get it on. Keep your fingers crossed and hopefully six months from now we’ll have an announcement about how that show is going to premier on such and such network.
JR: I promise I will! Now what other projects are investors going to be able to be apart of with round four?
JA: So when you invest in Legion M you are investing in the company right, so I mean in a sense you are investing in Mandy because you will become a part owner of Legion M and Legion M is a part owner of Mandy and Bad Samaritan and all the projects like Icons with Stan Lee and Kevin Smith. So you are really kind of buying in to the whole thing. As far as new projects that are coming out, like I said the best thing you can do is take that M-Pulse survey. In fact you can take it even if you are looking at Legion M. You don’t actually have to be an investor. Legion M is actually open, you can join as a free member, you don’t have to invest to be apart of it. Like I said earlier you can only invest when a round is open. Because we are not always open for investors and because we know there are a lot of people who are interested in the idea, but they want to check it out and see if this is legit or is this real. They want to see what this is all about so we allow you to join as a free member and as a free member you get almost all of the same perks as an investor. You get to do the M-Pulse survey and like I said if you look at M-Pulse, sprinkled in that are a lot of the projects that we are looking at. It is not guaranteed but I would say most likely some of our next projects are buried in M-Pulse and if it is not this M-Pulse it will be the next M-Pulse and you can have a hand in helping us decide which ones we want to focus on.
JR: This sounds amazing. You folks have done movies, you are doing TV shows, you have your VR projects, the comic that is coming out, are there any other forms of media that you guys want to tackle over the next couple of years like things that haven’t really been touched on in Hollywood?
JA: I think that games is something that I would expect that is something we will get into at some point. We have had some propositions that have come by and I think that it is a great fit for us. Whether it is a mobile game or potentially a console game or something like that. One of the really interesting things about entertainment in general is that it is a little bit like the Wild West, everything is changing really rapidly. If you look over just the past ten years and look at the way people consume entertainment it has fundamentally changed. Netflix was not the player that it was ten years ago, Amazon Prime I don’t think even existed five years ago. The fact that if you look at the amount of time people spend going to movie theaters versus watching movies on their phone. I think it is all over the place.
Virtual reality is a new frontier. Virtual reality is in a totally nascent stage. And if you have tried it, it’s cool but it’s clear that it is not quite there yet but it is also clear that it is coming. There is going to be a day, probably not to long from now, when you slip that thing on and it is like going into the Oasis, visually indistinguishable from real life. There is a lot of people, smart people and smart companies that are investing billions and billions of dollars because they believe that virtual reality could be as trans-formative to entertainment as television was in the days of radio. So virtual reality is this whole new frontier and interactive television is this whole fascinating frontier as our TVs become smarter and more people are watching on devices where you have interface so it doesn’t necessarily be a lean back and watch but be a little bit of lean forward.
There is all these kind of new paradigms and even I would say as a trend if you look at it, back in my day when I was growing up the only place you could see a movie was literally at the movies. I remember when we got our first VCR and for the first time we could rent a movie and watch it in our living room and that was groundbreaking at the time. You flash forward to today and we are completely immersed in media. My kids are more likely to watch a movie on their cell phone, far more likely than they are to go out and go to a movie theater. I think there is a lot of advantages to that as far as convenience and accessibility for everybody, but at the same time there is also a loss of the social aspect of what it means to go out to a movie and see a movie with a group of other people and the communal experience that you get. Even if it is just you and a couple friends or the difference between watching the movie in a crowded theater. In a lot of ways it is similar to listening to a CD on a good stereo and going to a concert. Right, they are just two fundamentally different things. When you are seeing a movie in a theater, people are laughing and cheering or screaming when scary things happen, it is a completely different experience. I think there are also these kind of undercurrents where this opportunity for live experiences and ways to enjoy media with say a midnight showing of Mandy for example with a bunch of other fan enthusiasts become more powerful.
So anyway that was a really long winded way of saying that the whole world of entertainment is like the Wild West right now and as a new company and as a fan owned company and as a company that is owned by tech pioneers, that is Paul and my background and co founders of the company. I think that we are better equipped than most companies to innovate and explore all this new territory that is available.
JR: It is pretty clear that you guys have such a huge passion and you guys have given this great opportunity to help bring fans into Hollywood. Experiencing Legion M at NYCC made you really felt apart of it. You guys have created such a large presence in the convention scene to really bring that whole idea to light.
JA: That is fantastic, it is very rewarding to hear your say that so thank you very much.
JR: You are very welcome. This has been really informative to because with it being such a new company there is still a lot of investors or people who want to invest with lots of questions. Do you have any parting words of wisdom for them?
JA: The only thing I would say is if you are curious, I just encourage you to check it out. Like I said, you can join for free and you are welcome to stay as a free member forever. At Legion M we think the size of your heart is more important than the size of your wallet. As a company we are like a snowball going down the hill, with each revolution we get bigger and the bigger we get the more powerful we become and so whether you just think this is an interesting thing you want to check out or a budding creative that is looking to get into the industry and wants to connect with other like minded people or whether you are a hardcore investor that is looking at good financial opportunities, we just encourage you to check it out. You can join for free, you can be apart of the community, you can join our members only Facebook and forums and events. We are going to do a live lounge at Sundance again this year that is available for Legion M members. You can literally come to Sundance and help us scout films, you have to pay your own way of course but we will work with you to have a place to hang out. Last year we had Leonard Maltin interviewing celebrities all weekend, it is just a fantastic community and a movement I would say more than anything else. So we really welcome you to come, check it out and be apart of it and help us change the world.
Even if you are unsure if investing is right for you, I highly suggest joining Legion M as a free member! It gives you access to some of the most experiences. You can join for free here and also secure a non binding spot in the next investment round which starts November 16, 2018. Legion M is really giving fans a say in Hollywood, one step at a time.
[Images provided by Legion M]
Who I Am: A nerd by the strictest definition. I enjoy diving straight into my favorite fandoms without a care in the world. I live on video/board games, fantasy movies and TV, and all things geeky.
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