AMC Theatres wants more movies playing on its screens, so it’s building its own pipeline to find them.
“If we can take steps to ensure that a few extra movies come to theatres each year, it is gravy for AMC,” said Adam Aron, AMC Entertainment’s Chairman and CEO, announcing the launch of Leawood Films on Monday, Aug. 31.
The name is a hometown nod. AMC is headquartered in Leawood, Kansas, and the new distribution company will run out of offices there and in Los Angeles, sending independently financed and completed movies into theaters both in the US and overseas.
Leawood Films won’t function like a studio. It’s not putting up money to get movies made — instead, it will pick up small and mid-budget movies that are already fully financed or finished, the kind of projects that often stall out after festivals or financing rounds because no major studio wants to spend money marketing them.
Aron isn’t running the search alone. Toby Emmerich, the former Chairman of Warner Bros. Pictures Group, former Walt Disney Studios marketing president Ricky Strauss and former Paramount Pictures distribution chief Kyle Davies will all advise the label and report directly to Aron, alongside entertainment attorney Craig Jacobson.
Two outside partners will actually get the movies onto screens: Variance Films domestically and Piece of Magic Entertainment internationally. Every release will honor a theatrical window of at least 45 days before Premium VOD and 90 days before streaming, and filmmakers keep their downstream revenue and the rights to their own work once the run ends.
Related: AMC Entertainment CEO Adam Aron on Box Office Drought: ‘We Need More Movies’
Don’t expect a Leawood Films logo before the previews anytime soon, though. No titles have been chosen yet, and AMC doesn’t anticipate a first release before 2027 or 2028.
This isn’t AMC’s first time in the distribution business. The chain co-owned Open Road Films from 2011 to 2017, which won the Best Picture Oscar for SPOTLIGHT before AMC sold its stake, and it more recently proved it could move tickets on movies nobody else was releasing with Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour concert film, the highest-grossing concert film ever, and Beyoncé’s RENAISSANCE.
Movieguide® has spent decades watching what happens when a good movie can’t find a home. SOUND OF FREEDOM is the case study everyone in Hollywood now knows by heart — a $14.5 million independent movie that most distributors passed on went on to earn more than $250 million worldwide once Angel Studios fought to get it a real theatrical release.
Leawood Films isn’t billing itself as a faith-based label, and Aron’s stated motive is filling empty screens, not championing any particular kind of story. But a distributor built specifically to rescue finished, worthy movies that studios won’t touch is, by design, a door that swings open for exactly the kind of overlooked movies Christian and independent filmmakers have spent years struggling to get through.
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