AMC Launches Leawood Films to Bring More Independent Movies Into Theaters

AMC Entertainment is getting into the movie distribution business. The theater chain announced on Monday the launch of Leawood Films, a new label built specifically to get small and mid budget independent movies onto the big screen, at a moment when plenty of festival favorites premiere to acclaim and then quietly disappear without ever landing a theatrical release.

The new venture takes its name from Leawood, Kansas, where AMC has its corporate headquarters, and the company says it will be based out of both Los Angeles and Leawood. Rather than financing or developing films itself, Leawood Films will acquire theatrical distribution rights to movies that are already fully financed or completed, then work to get them onto screens both inside and outside the AMC circuit.

Three industry veterans are advising the label. Toby Emmerich, the former chairman of the Warner Bros. Pictures Group, is on board alongside Ricky Strauss, who previously ran marketing for The Walt Disney Studios, and Kyle Davies, who most recently led distribution at Bleecker Street and earlier served as president of domestic distribution at Paramount Pictures. Entertainment attorney Craig Jacobson of Hansen Jacobson is representing the venture, which has also lined up Variance Films to handle North American distribution and Piece of Magic Entertainment to handle international.

The pitch to filmmakers is straightforward. Hand over a completed or fully financed movie, and Leawood Films will work to get it a real theatrical run while letting the filmmaker keep the majority of their downstream revenue and retain ownership of the work, rather than signing away long term rights the way many traditional distribution deals require. AMC says every Leawood release will carry at least a 45 day window before becoming available on premium on demand platforms, and a 90 day window before landing on subscription streaming, protecting the kind of exclusive theatrical run that has become harder to guarantee for smaller films.

AMC CEO Adam Aron has framed the label’s mission in simple terms, saying it was created with one straightforward objective, to bring more movies to theatres. He has also been careful not to oversell it as a major new profit center, describing it more as a way to put idle screen capacity to good use. If Leawood Films manages to get a handful of additional movies into theaters each year that otherwise would not have made it there, Aron has said, that counts as a win.

That idle capacity is really the business case here. AMC operates thousands of screens, and with plenty of open dates left on the calendar between major studio releases, the company sees an opportunity to fill those gaps with work from independent and emerging filmmakers instead of leaving screens dark. It is a similar instinct to the one that led AMC to previously distribute event films like Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, which made more than 260 million dollars worldwide, and Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé, along with The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act. Leawood Films effectively turns that earlier experiment into a permanent, ongoing operation focused specifically on the small and mid budget movies, across any genre, that have increasingly struggled to find theatrical homes in recent years.

AMC also plans to get Leawood titles into theaters beyond its own auditoriums, working with other circuits to widen a film’s reach further than AMC alone could offer. That kind of cross circuit cooperation would give independent filmmakers access to a broader release than most standalone distributors could typically arrange.

Do not expect a Leawood Films title on a marquee anytime soon, though. AMC has indicated the label’s first releases likely will not hit theaters until 2027 or 2028 at the earliest, and no specific films or filmmakers have been announced yet. But for a festival circuit where plenty of strong, finished movies leave Sundance or SXSW every year without a distributor in place, Leawood Films is shaping up as a new option built specifically around giving those films a shot on the big screen.