First I've ever heard of a lion code.  I honestly thought they attached the same intro for an entire produciton run.  The number of roars has certainly varied through the years, but I'm curious if it has varied over the course of, say, one year.

Quoting richierich:

Quote:
So I was told today....

The MGM Lion which roars before the film starts, always roars between one and three times.
One for a bad film that they didn't expect to do well and three if they thought they had made a fantastic film that they expected to do well.

Sounds like rubbish - but is it? 

Looked at Ben-Hur ('59) the other day and noticed the MGM Lion didn't roar at all.. He just sat there..
I guess no roars  means a major dud ..   

The other urban myth involving the lion was that originally it wasn't supposed to roar.  It was supposed to just sit there all regal like for a few seconds.  So the myth goes that MGM rented out a warehouse where they were doing the photo shoot which happened to be close to a bank.  So some guys end up robbing the bank on the same day and in their attempt to get away from the police they duck into the warehouse only to be met by the lion who roared at them right as they were filming the logo and then jumped on one robber, mauling him.  The lion trainer managed to get the lion under control and the other robber ran back outside and in his panick right in front of a speeding police car.  Neither robber lived.  Or so the story goes.. 

-edit-
Hah!  I was actually able to find a video about this particular myth.  It's the 3rd story into the show so you have to watch a couple minutes of other urban myth stories, but it's in there.  I didn't have the story exactly right, but close enough.