Angel Studios won’t say how much of the film’s $164 million domestic take comes from donated tickets or those bought directly by a moviegoer.
One major studio was so interested in the topic that it commissioned survey of social media discourse. “The online response to Sound of Freedom has been less about the movie and more rooted in conspiracy theories and ongoing political-culture wars within the US and the globe at large,” says the summary.
Sound of Freedom, which has earned staggering $164 million domestically through Aug. 6, quietly opened in cinemas July 4, beating Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny for the day.
It has done well the Midwest and South, and big business in California and other parts of the West (the Northeast has under-indexed).
It has topped the domestic grosses of summer big-budget features, The Flash ($108 million), Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part 1 ($151 million) and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts ($157 million).
The film stars Jim Caviezel (Passion of the Christ) as real-life Tim Ballard, an agent for the Department of Homeland Security before embarking on his own quest to bring child traffickers to justice. The film’s blockbuster performance has no doubt been boosted by Angel’s mastermind plan to change the way movies are distributed through its innovative “Pay It Forward” model, whereby people are urged to buy and then donate Sound of Freedom tickets for others to use. Those “others” can grab a code off the Pay It Forward website and then redeem it using major online ticketing services or an individual theater.
Sound of Freedom director Alejandro Monteverde and producer/star Eduardo Verástegui, who have known each other for years and are both from Mexico, spent an arduous eight years bringing the indie movie to the big screen, including cobbling together the financing for the $14.5 million film. Fox International made a distribution deal with the filmmakers in 2018, before the Disney merger closed in 2019. Disney ended up shelving the film’s theatrical release but allowed the filmmakers to buy back the rights.
Jared Geesey, Angel Studios vp global distribution, believes Sound of Freedom will cross the $200 million mark in America.
And the movie hasn’t yet begun rolling out overseas.
It is set to open across Latin America next month, where much of the film was shot (in the U.S., Latinos made up 37 percent of the audience). There are opening dates for the U.K., Australia and South Africa, and is in the process of firming up plans for other territories (Angel is self-distributing everywhere but Australia and Africa0.
According to Geesey, only redeemed tickets are counted when Angel reports grosses to Comscore, the industry record-keeper of box office grosses.
Many continue to be skeptical.
“There should be more transparency,” says one studio source. In addition to the issue of grosses, it’s hard to know how many people are actually watching the movie if we don’t know the number of tickets redeemed.” Earlier in the movie’s run, social media was rife with posts about near-empty auditoriums for supposedly sold-out shows, prompting numerous outlets to report on the issue. Such reports have since abated.
Distributors and theater owners are intrigued by the potential of a Pay It Forward model, considering the precarious nature of the box office recovery.
Indie distributor Magnolia Pictures is copying Angel’s playbook, urging those interested in the indie documentary Kokomo City to donate tickets. The doc, about four Black transgender sex workers, opened at the IFC Center in New York City over July 28-30 weekend before expanding to several other cities last weekend, including San Francisco. But donated tickets can only be redeemed at the IFC Center and San Francisco’s Roxie Theater (offer will remain in place for the film’s full run).
It’s certainly not the first time that a distributor or studio has asked people or companies to donate blocks of tickets for an individual, issue-driven movie, but it’s never been done on a wholesale basis.
Angel also used the Pay It Forward ticket model when releasing its first film theatrically, the faith-based His Only Son. The movie did far more business than expected, grossing $12 million at the North American box office. As with Sound of Freedom, Angel has not said how many tickets were donated. Before its theatrical run, His Only Son raised more than $1.2 million from 1,863 people in crowdfunding offering to cover for costs associated with marketing and releasing the film, according to Angel.
The Harmon brothers, part of a well-known Mormon family and founders of the Utah-based Angel empire, have a long and complicated relationship with Hollywood. Their previous company, the streaming service VidAngel, was sued by Disney, 20th Century Fox, Lucasfilm and Warner in 2016 for alleged copyright infringement after VidAngel developed filtering technology that allowed movies to be sanitized for its faith-based and conservative-leaning audiences.
In 2019, a jury ordered VidAngel to pay $62 million in damages; a settlement was reached the following year, with VidAngel agreeing to pay the studios $10 million over 10 years. Angel Studios emerged from VidAngel bankruptcy proceedings and launched in March 2021.
Angel may be in the midst of having to pay off its $10 million debt to studios, but it snarks at Hollywood for being out of touch with what consumers really want in terms of entertainment (a mantra it has used time and time again through the years). “Investors invested over $10 million to produce The Chosen, which became a smash hit, being viewed over 100 million times and generating over $30 million dollars in revenue in 2020,” says Angel’s website. “In contrast, Hollywood produces most of Seth Rogen’s movies because Seth thought it would be fun and we know how most of those turn out.” Angel doesn’t provide a reason for taking aim at Rogen, who has a slew of box office wins, whether family credits including The Super Mario Bros. Movie, The Lion King and the Kung Fu Panda series or raunchy, R-rated fare (the Neighbors films, Knocked Up).
Actress and producer Ashley Bratcher, part of Hollywood’s faith-based filmmaker community and starred in the pro-life film Unplanned, says she had an unhappy experience with Angel Studios over the crowdfunding campaign for Pharma, a project from her production banner Simple Jane Films. The film is about Frances Kelsey, an employee of the Federal Drug Administration in the 1960s who risked her career to stop morning-sickness drug thalidomide from being approved. “Our team decided to leave Angel after we asked a lot of questions that they didn’t answer. There were mounting tensions as to who was handling the financing aspect and where the money was going,” she says.
On Aug. 4, Angel Studios released statement without specifically referring to Marta’s arrest. “Just as anyone can invest in the stock market, everyone who meets the legal criteria can invest in Angel Studios projects. One of the perks of investing was the ability to be listed in the credits,” Neal Harmon, CEO of Angel Studios, said.
He noted that 6,678 people invested an average of $501 in the marketing fund, which totaled $6 million.
Angel, along with filmmakers, dispute that Sound of Freedom is a QAnon movie, although it has been discussed on QAnon message boards. In late 2021, Caviezel spoke at a QAnon convention in Las Vegas, where he invoked the QAnon slogan, “The storm is upon us.”
“Anyone who has seen Sound of Freedom knows that it has nothing to do with conspiracy theories,” says Geesey. Mira Sorvino also disavowed “QAnon & any hate speech” in July 12 tweet. She urges people to get involved in stop trafficking, a “worldwide and local atrocity.”
At a recent showing in Los Angeles, most guests stayed in their seats when the movie finished. Caviezel appeared in taped 3-minute video explaining Pay It Forward, and personally encouraged people to purchase tickets.
“We don’t have big studio money to market this movie, but we have you and the baton has now been passed to you,” the message says. “Now, I know it’s weird because we’re in a theater, but feel free to pull out your phones and scan this QR code. We don’t want finances to be the reason someone doesn’t see this movie.”
