AMC Entertainment is getting into a business it’s never really been in before: distribution. The largest theatrical exhibitor in the U.S. and the world has announced the creation of Leawood Films, a new film distribution company headquartered in both Los Angeles and AMC’s home base of Leawood, Kansas, built around a simple idea: get more movies onto the big screen.

The new venture is intentionally low-risk for AMC. Rather than financing productions, developing scripts, or taking on the traditional risks of film production, Leawood Films will only work with established and emerging filmmakers who have already secured full financing for their own films, or who already have a completed film in hand.

From there, Leawood Films leans on what AMC already does well, guaranteeing theater placement and pairing it with the company’s marketing muscle and exhibition expertise. The company says its own downstream revenue and IP ownership will largely stay with the filmmakers themselves, meaning the economics could look meaningfully different from a traditional studio distribution deal.

Leawood Films will respect a 45-day or greater premium video-on-demand window and a 90-day or more subscription video-on-demand window.

The idea is partly rooted in AMC’s own recent track record. The company points to the massive screen counts it pulled off for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour and Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé in 2023, followed by Taylor Swift | The Official Release Party of a Showgirl in 2025, as proof of concept that AMC can move serious volume when it commits to a release.

Leawood Films plans to build on that by partnering with other major theater circuits both domestically and internationally, rather than relying solely on AMC’s own screens.

The label is expected to focus primarily on small and medium-sized releases, films that might otherwise struggle to find theatrical distribution elsewhere, and it won’t be limited to any specific genre or to the concert-film format that’s worked so well for AMC in the past.

AMC frames the whole effort as a response to excess capacity across the movie theater industry, positioning Leawood Films as additive to the ecosystem rather than a replacement for its existing studio relationships, which the company says will remain its primary partnerships going forward by a wide margin.

As of now, Leawood Films hasn’t selected its first slate of films, and AMC says the earliest projects likely won’t hit theaters until sometime in 2027 or 2028.

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