Lionsgate's Fan Club is about more than just loyalty

Edition 114 is here, just two days before we all gather in Olympic Park in East London for SEG3 London 2026!

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I’m outing myself as a mega-nerd this week as I explore Lionsgate’s new fan club. Incidentally, this touches on several of the sessions we’ve got planned for SEG3 London, from Scaling IP Beyond the Core to Building and Growing a Franchise, and Bringing Characters to Life: Preparing IP for the Era of AI to The Fan Operating System: Building to Match Ambition.

Plus Speed Reads of:

When I was about 11, I was finally shown the wonder of Star Wars: A New Hope. We sat and watched it as a family, and then quickly rented the subsequent VHS tapes from our local video store (which was also a hardware store, oddly enough) and devoured them. My brother cried when Darth Vader died. 

I fell so in love with the fictional world George Lucas had created that I sat down to write three fan letters. Not, as you might suspect, to Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fisher but to Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Princess Leia. (Yes, I was that delulu. And, yes, my parents encouraged it!)

I don’t know what happened to those letters. Knowing the USPS, I think they probably wound up in the bin, along with a million other letters to the likes of Santa and the tooth fairy…

I never lost this enthusiasm for entertainment. I managed to transform it into a career, and I am fortunate enough to review films of all calibres and interview writers, directors, and actors from across the globe. (Of course, there is a difference between being a fan and a journalist, but that’s a newsletter subject for another time!)

So when Lionsgate announced an actual bona fide fan club, I nearly plotzed! (A good Yiddishism for you there.) As someone who came of age in the time of LiveJournal fan-fiction and Tumblr gifsets, the idea of being an active fan has always been at the core of how I understand fandom. That those in charge of IP are now rewarding that proactiveness shows how far things have come in 25 years… 

Of course, it’s not an entirely altruistic move. It isn’t just about providing fans with a space to legally play with their favourite IP. It also gives Lionsgate a big leg up in terms of understanding its fandom, and therefore understanding how to monetise them…

The Lionsgate Club is a fan rewards platform where members can access official clips to create edits, complete challenges, play games, design, and earn rewards for sharing content from Lionsgate franchises. John Wick is the first in the list, with more IP to follow.

The foundation of the club is simple: create, play, engage, and earn, connecting your socials so that likes, shares and comments can all be rewarded. The numbers behind the John Wick fandom that this is built on top of are already significant. According to Lionsgate, there are already 144k+ fan posts, 73k+ creators in the fandom, 100M+ engagements, and over a billion views. (Though they don’t say in what time frame, or what channels, the numbers are still impressive.)

That's a fan community that's already been showing up, without an official home, without official assets, and without any kind of recognition from the IP owner. And Lionsgate are finally tapping into it.

The conventional studio strategy has been: make the film, market the film, distribute the film. Fan communities have been a byproduct of the success (or sometimes, lack thereof) of a film, and not a product in their own right.

What Lionsgate is doing is recognising that fans are already doing marketing work. They’re cutting clips, making edits, posting and sharing, and instead of ignoring it or trying to police it, they're building infrastructure that rewards it, a strategy we covered in Edition 82.

This connects directly to something we cover a lot. How do you work with your fans, leverage what they make, and keep control of what makes your IP unique?

The way the fan club is built is also what I think is an answer to a bigger structural problem for studios.

They have historically had little insight into who their most engaged fans actually are. Box office data tells you how many people watched, streaming data tells you completion rates, but neither tells you who the 73,000 creators are that have been making John Wick content, or what would get them to make more.

Points programs and fan reward schemes have existed for years and across industries; the Cleveland Cavaliers, for instance, have a web3 rewards programme that offered fans points for attending games, purchasing tickets, and interacting with team content, redeemable for merchandise and exclusive experiences. (A quick plug for our Speakeasy podcast, there!)

But there's a meaningful distinction with what Lionsgate are doing. Most loyalty programs reward consumption, watching, buying, attending; The Lionsgate Club is rewarding creation and distribution. That's a different relationship with fans, and a much higher ceiling on the value it generates.

Deloitte research shows that 54% of online fans say they want brands to engage them through fan loyalty and rewards programs, and yet most programs are still built on the old model of spend-to-earn. The Lionsgate Club is closer to earn-to-share, which is where meatier leverage sits in my opinion.

This is similar to the Spotify x UMG deal and the Hasbro AI lab. And, you can catch UMG’s SVP of Digital Strategy, AI and Innovation, talking about building the fan journey and Hasbro AI lab’s founder, both on stage at SEG3 London on Thursday!

John Wick already has a creator-native fandom, fans who are already making edits, mashups and content. Launching with a franchise that naturally lends itself to short-form visual content is smart product thinking. I don’t think the same approach would have landed the same way with a dialogue-driven drama.

A big friction point for fan creators is operating in a legal grey area, using studio footage without permission, not knowing if a takedown is coming. By providing official clips within the platform, Lionsgate is collapsing that anxiety and channelling creative energy into distribution they can track.

John Wick Chapter 5 is in development. A loyal, activated creator base heading into that release cycle is worth far more than a traditional marketing spend. They're pre-building the creator distribution network that will help drive it towards success.

Like I said, this isn’t an entirely altruistic venture, nor even a solely capitalistic one. It’s also about data. 

Every fan who signs up, links their socials, and starts creating is generating data that Lionsgate has never had before. Not just views and demographics, but intent signals, content preferences, creative behaviour, and social influence. A fan engagement platform like The Lionsgate Club bundles loyalty rewards, gamification, and community tools to capture sign-ups, behaviour, and viewing data that can help them to build clean first-party audiences, which can help them to target, close and activate commercial partners in a more focused way.

And for a studio that doesn't own a streaming service or a direct consumer relationship at scale (yet, that's the beginning of finding and capturing its own, owned audience.

If you're building or managing an audience, the Lionsgate Club is worth studying because of how it rewards their most engaged fans in return for all the distribution work they're already doing.

By bringing fans into the ecosystem, Lionsgate is not only rewarding fans for being loyal, but it’s also encouraging them to go from being passive audiences into active participants. And from there, to loyal distributors of the very IP and franchises they love. 

If you have fans, and your fans are making content with your IP, it’s worth asking yourself if you’re rewarding them for the work they're already doing to spread the word. If the answer is no, that's your chance!

The interactive game experience gives viewers more choice to explore the match both in real-time, highlights and full-match replays.

TL;DR

Why you should care

The BBC is calling this a "second screen" experience, but that undersells it. What Immersiv.io and the BBC have actually built is a real-time 3D render of a live match, driven by the same skeletal tracking data that powers semi-automated offside technology. The tactical and first-person angles are fundamentally different ways of consuming sport.

This is built on Immersiv.io's ARISE platform, which the company has already deployed with DAZN at the 2025 Club World Cup, MLS's All-Star Game, and DFL's SportsInnovation programme. The product is SDK-based and designed to be plugged into an existing app or delivered standalone, with features that can be picked and chosen depending on the sport and the audience. That modularity is important because it's the difference between a one-off broadcast gimmick and infrastructure that other rights holders can license and adapt.

Immersiv.io frames the output in three layers: data overlaid directly on the video feed, a 3D companion view for game analysis, and contextual information overlaid on the real pitch inside a venue. The BBC version is essentially the same toolkit applied to the World Cup. Worth noting too, the company reports a 75% engagement rate on the product, which, regardless of the precise methodology behind that figure, signals this isn't a feature fans politely ignore once they've tried it.

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That’s all for now, everyone - thanks again for reading the latest edition of The SEG3 Report. If you found it of interest, please do consider sharing with a colleague or friend who’d enjoy it too!