This Studio Turns to Viewers of Faith to Greenlight Movies

New York Times

09-04-2025

When 'Sound of Freedom,' a $14.5 million indie film about child trafficking based on the life of a Homeland Security agent, stormed the box office to become an unlikely $250 million hit, practically nobody saw its runaway success coming.
Except Neal Harmon.
Harmon is the chief executive of Angel Studios, a self-described 'values-based distribution company,' that he founded in 2013 in Provo, Utah, with his brothers Daniel, Jeffrey and Jordan as well as their cousin Benton. Even before a rave review from Ted Cruz and a private screening held by Donald J. Trump, the reception for 'Sound of Freedom' was effectively preordained, Neal explained in a recent interview, because the studio's million-member Angel Guild had endorsed the film before the company decided to acquire the distribution rights.
'We definitely knew it was going to be successful because of the guild's reaction,' Neal said. 'We knew it was going to be really well received.'
Most distributors rely on the instincts of a programming team, which typically attends festivals and watches screeners like a prospector sifting for gold. Angel's model defers to the subscribers of its streaming platform, which has grown to become one of the most-downloaded apps on the Apple TV store, occasionally surpassing Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video.
In addition to a library of original content, the Angel app features short-form concept videos for potential movies or TV shows. Subscribers, or guild members, answer short surveys about the videos, and based on the results, Angel decides whether to greenlight projects. Subscriber fees are funneled back into the films and shows in production, essentially turning Angel's system into a wide-scale crowdfunding model.
'Everyone in the industry is trying to guess what audiences want,' Jared Geesey, the studio's chief distribution officer, said. 'Our crazy idea is: Why not just ask them? And actually listen?'
Angel calls these concept reels 'torches,' and guild members are asked to rate them not on whether they seem promising or intriguing, but on whether they seem to 'amplify the light,' a term with roots in Angel's foundational Christianity. Angel prides itself on producing uplifting, 'faith-friendly' programming. Not all of it is overtly religious: 'Rule Breakers,' in theaters now, is about Afghanistan's first competitive robotics team. The studio, Neal explained, is interested in 'backing stories that align with universal principles,' which he defined as 'truth, honesty, nobility, justice, authenticity, loveliness, admiration and excellence.'
These principles may be maddeningly vague: What's the difference between truth, honesty and authenticity? But when you take a look at the Angel catalog, you begin to detect some common themes. Its first theatrical release, 'His Only Son,' was a biblical epic about Abraham and Isaac, and the company's marquee TV series, 'The Chosen,' told the story of Jesus of Nazareth. 'The King of Kings,' opening April 11, is an animated biopic about Jesus (voiced by Oscar Isaac), told from the point of view of Charles Dickens (Kenneth Branagh).
Seong-ho Jang, the director of 'The King of Kings,' said through a translator that he wanted to work with Angel because he 'saw all the movies they did that were Christian-based or that the whole family can watch,' and that the studio's identity as faith-friendly was 'very important.'
Still, the Harmons expressed some frustration with being pigeonholed as a Christian movie studio. That frustration stems in part from how the movie business tends to regard Angel's target audience as niche. 'I think the faith-friendly market has been lumped into a more evangelist market,' Jeffrey Harmon said. 'Not every Christian is out preaching the gospel all day long. This is something that represents how people actually feel inside. It doesn't mean the content has to be preachy.'
Brandon Purdie, an executive vice president at Angel, said that the kinds of movies Angel makes were sometimes unfairly sidelined. 'You don't look at a movie about a demented joker and say, 'This is only for people who are demented jokers,'' he said. 'That's a broad, wide release. But when it comes to content that amplifies light, people sometimes assume it's only for a narrow audience.'
David A. Gross, a box office analyst, described the faith-based theatrical market as 'a vibrant, low-budget niche' on the rise, with increased interest in the subject since the pandemic. Even if the audiences are smaller than mainstream ones, they're more engaged and dedicated, which 'brings marketing costs way down, because the campaigns are direct and efficient, through email, word-of-mouth, church promotions, et al.,' he said.
'There are plenty of faith-based pictures that flop at the box office, too, so not everything is a hit,' he added. 'But all of the films end up on streaming, pay TV and TV, and they make good money in those ancillary businesses.'
Shawn Robbins, an analyst at Box Office Theory, said that overall, faith- and values-based movies have come to play an important role in the overall film industry. They provide 'the kind of consistent, midrange box office performers that lift the overall health of the business,' he said.
'In the post-pandemic and post-peak-streaming world,' he added, 'these films have generated foot traffic in theaters during slow times on the release calendar.'
Most of Angel's films have earned in the neighborhood of $10 million to $20 million at the North American box office, which puts the studio in the company of specialty distributors like Neon and A24. True breakouts like 'Sound of Freedom' are rare for any studio, but Purdie insisted that Angel's audience was expanding. 'We're not just preaching to the choir here,' he said. 'If a film is well made and speaks to the human spirit, then it can be for everyone — people of different faiths, even people of no faith at all.'
In December, Angel released 'Homestead,' a postapocalyptic action thriller starring Neal McDonough, which earned a respectable $20 million on a modest budget. 'That doesn't exactly scream faith-based title — it sounds like an old-school 1980s genre movie,' said Daniel Loria, the senior vice president of content strategy at boxofficepro.com. 'That's the sort of flexibility that Angel is going to be able to move towards in the coming years.' While dedicated faith-based programming can still lead to the rare breakout hit, Loria said, he thinks 'Angel has an ambition of being outside of that niche, and they have an opportunity to widen their scope.'
'It's very forward-thinking,' he added.
'Sound of Freedom' resonated with large swaths of the American right — including QAnon-aligned conspiracy theorists. One of the film's most striking features was that it ended with a call to action: Using a QR code, fans were invited to purchase tickets for other moviegoers, a 'pay it forward' donation system that Angel has since integrated into many of its projects. Critics argued that Angel was essentially goosing its own box office receipts by persuading a passionate fan base to bankroll phantom tickets: enamored zealots shelling out for empty seats.
'They were harnessing people's fear and outrage over child sex trafficking in a very cynical way,' Will Sloan, a film critic and podcaster, said. 'But at the end of the day I think they've found a cynical but clever way to exploit their market. And I guess I can't begrudge them too much for that.'
Angel's marketing savvy propelled 'Sound of Freedom' to be one of the top 10 highest-grossing films at the domestic box office in 2023. Alejandro Monteverde, the film's director and co-writer, shot 'Sound of Freedom' in 2018, and spent years trying and failing to secure a distributor. 'So when Angel came along, it was like finding a glass of water in the desert,' he said.
Monteverde is in postproduction on 'Zero A.D.,' a biblical epic about King Herod that Angel will release later this year. (The concept was a hit with guild members, who voted to finance it.) Though it tells a religious story, Monteverde was quick to point out that it wasn't just for Christian audiences. 'If you are a person of faith, you will see it through that lens,' he said. 'But if you are not, you will still be able to engage with it, just like someone who doesn't usually watch sci-fi can still enjoy a great sci-fi movie.'
For Neal Harmon, a movie like 'Zero A.D.' isn't niche: By design and by its very nature, it's mainstream. He added that this was true throughout Hollywood history. 'Once upon a time, when Cecil B. DeMille made 'The Ten Commandments,' it was the blockbuster of the decade — the most expensive film ever made,' he said. 'Was that movie faith-based? Well, it was based on the Bible, but was just a huge epic — a story that everyone could be excited about.'
He doesn't understand why that's no longer the case.
'Somewhere along the line, that changed,' he said. 'Now we have a 'faith' category, and suddenly that makes it smaller. I don't even know why that distinction exists, or how it's helpful.'