The Jim Caviezel child-trafficking drama “Sound of Freedom” from faith-based distributor Angel Studios made $14.2 million in a single day when it opened July 4. You can chalk that success up to any number of reasons: Religious audiences are underserved, the film has been bolstered by major right-wing pundits (and Donald Trump himself), and it opened on a rare Tuesday after “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” had five days to quiet down.
But the film’s real godsend is the ability for “Sound of Freedom” fans to buy movie tickets for complete strangers.
Angel Studios calls it “Pay It Forward,” in which you can buy a ticket for “Sound of Freedom,” pay for another one, and someone else can apply to redeem it if they don’t have the financial means. A larger group of people buying tickets in bulk, such as for a company or a church, can even redeem a portion of their tickets for free. The distributor says of its $14.2 million haul, $2.6 million came from people overpaying through those Pay It Forward ticket sales.
That’s not just a few “angel” investors, either. Angel Studios’ website boasts that over 200,000 individual contributors chipped in for additional tickets, with a goal of 2 million tickets sold in the first week. (That would represent the 2 million kids who are trafficked each year; Angel claims to have already hit 1.4 million tickets.) Jared Geesey, Angel Studios’ senior VP of global distribution, tells IndieWire the team had to scale up Angels’ servers in response to a wave of people who wanted to support the film after seeing it on the 4th.
“It is everyday people saying, ‘You need to see this film and be part of this movement to bring awareness to these children and the plight of human trafficking,’” Geesey said. “That’s what the Pay It Forward technology is empowering, the generosity of other people who want you to see this so that your finances are not a reason for you to not be impacted by this story.”
Given that $11.56 million of the total came from actual box office receipts of people who showed up on the 4th, it’s up for debate whether “Sound of Freedom” really beat out “Indy 5” as the No. 1 movie in America on Independence Day. Its A+ CinemaScore is impressive, but not uncommon when polling faith-based audiences. Geesey clarified that while the film generated over $10 million in presales, that included tickets sold through July 9.
The numbers make the industry take notice. “Sound of Freedom” is Angel Studios’ second theatrical release. Its first, biblical film “His Only Son,” which opened over the 2023 Easter holiday, was the first to utilize the Pay It Forward platform. It made over $12 million on a budget of just $250,000. Angel Studios declined to say how much “His Only Son” brought in via Pay It Forward, but an April Washington Examiner report said the program represented an additional 20,000 tickets. Prior to that, Angel TV series “The Chosen,” an event release through Fathom Events, brought in $5.5 million for the first two episodes of the show’s third season.
“Sound of Freedom” is Angel’s widest release to date on more than 2,600 screens. While the movie has some faith-based overtones, it’s not overtly religious. It even has a PG-13 rating due to its heavy subject matter, which leads analysts to believe the film is finding appeal beyond the core faith-based crowd.
“This is yet another example of a faith-based distributor breaking the rules and coming out a winner,” Comscore senior analyst Paul Dergarabedian told IndieWire. “[It] also shows that a grassroots marketing strategy and tapping into the power of the faith-based audience has proven to be a very effective method to generate profits.”
One reason Angel Studios can utilize the Pay It Forward model is its status as an equity crowdfunding company. The distributor has an “Angel Guild” of over 100,000 individual investors and shareholders who make content decisions on the distributor’s releases and investments, including “Sound of Freedom.”
The model is more common in the superfan space, but Angel Studios uses it for direct-marketing outreach that raises awareness beyond traditional billboards and TV ads. With a chance to see a return on its investment, that group of investors is more likely to evangelize others to see it.
Geesey said “Sound of Freedom” tested particularly well with the Angel Guild, who rated it based on whether it aligned with Angel Studios’ mission to “amplify light” in entertainment for a faith-friendly audience.
“Do you want this to be out in the world? How disappointed would you be if this was not released by Angel Studios?,” Geesey said of the team’s criteria.
That guild also crowdfunded the $5 million in P&A that allowed Angel Studios to release it wide, and those investors will receive up to 120 percent of their investment before the producers and distributors get their cut of the profits. Even with a $14.2 million single-day start, which Geesey said wildly exceeded Angel’s expectations, the studio have a ways to go to break even. The film — which Angel acquired rather than produced in-house — was made on a budget of $14.6 million.
“Sound of Freedom” began as a 2018 production set up with a Latin America distribution deal at Fox. After Fox’s merger with Disney in 2019, producer Eduardo Verástegui bought back the film’s rights and shopped it around before eventually landing at Angel Studios. As to why the film never got off the ground at Disney, a Disney spokesperson said the studios division at Disney had no knowledge of the film given its pre-merger status as an international acquisition.
Geesey believes that Hollywood could be missing an opportunity. He said Angel’s equity crowdfunding and Pay It Forward models are designed to prove that their faith-friendly audience is more than niche.
“[Hollywood] stories have tended to get darker and darker and grittier, so our crazy idea is that we just want to let people decide what they want to watch,” Geesey said. “We’re not anti-Hollywood; we just think that the Hollywood gatekeeper system as a way of choosing what content comes to market we think is antiquated and not effective.”
