"Sound" is Making Noise
The journey of the surprise hit "The Sound of Freedom", starring Jim Caviezel and Mira Sorvino reads like the biblical story of wandering Israelites.
The story behind "Sound of Freedom" might rightly be seen as a product waiting for the right time, the ignorance of studio, streaming and distribution executives or merely God's Providence.
The company eventually purchasing the worldwide distribution rights is an evolution of VidAngel, the company in Provo, Utah, that began in 2013 by taking TV productions and movies and using software, removing/blanking offensive dialog and scenes from them to make them more family friendly.
Disney and other major studios sued VidAngel for copyright infringement and won a $62 million dollar award. In early September 2020, VidAngel reached a settlement in the lawsuit to pay damages of $9.9 million rather than the original $62.4 million ordered by the court.
Obviously, for a small company, that could have been the end, but in 2021, VidAngel came under new ownership as the original owners moved out of VidAngel and shifted their focus to original content under the newly created company called Angel Studios.
Angel Studios largely relies on crowdfunding to launch their projects and had a bone fide hit with the crowdfunded TV series "The Chosen", launched in 2019, which opened the door to "Sound of Freedom".
The journey of "Sound of Freedom" from South America to Angel Studios sounds a lot like Hebrews wandering in the desert.
Written in 2015, it was shot in Colombia under director Alejandro Monteverde (for $14.5 million) and even though it was helmed by Jim Caviezel and Mira Sorvino, very solid actors but not popular in Hollywood due to their expressed religious views, the movie struggled for a way to get to the public.
In 2018, an international division of Fox made a deal for a future release in Latin America. After Disney acquired Fox in 2019, those limited rights transferred, but due to the lack of action on Disney/s part to release the film, the producer, Eduardo Verástegui, bought the movie back.
Disney said the company’s studio division had no knowledge of the film due to the international licensing.
I'm ripping off and paraphrasing Wall Street Journal a bit here:
“This is a movie about child trafficking. It’s not a Disney movie,” said Verástegui, who also stars in the film as a billionaire backer of the hero’s rescue mission. Verástegui said he spent the next several years pitching the completed movie to other theatrical distributors and streaming services. No deal. During that period, the scant notice “Sound of Freedom” received came when Caviezel described the scourge of child trafficking with language that echoed QAnon conspiracy theories.
In March of 2022, Verástegui approached Angel Studios executives, Jordan, Neal, Jeffrey and Daniel Harmon with the release rights. The Angel executives vetted “Sound of Freedom” with the method they said they use to test all new projects for a potential green light. They showed the movie to an online focus group made up of investors in previous Angel projects, a group of about 100,000 people known as the Angel Guild.
In May, Angel filed a public offering to raise the money needed to distribute “Sound of Freedom” to theaters and market the release. About 7,000 people invested between $10 and $25,000 each, the company said, hitting Angel’s target of $5 million in two weeks. These believers in the picture stood to earn up to 20% in profit on their investment from “Sound of Freedom” ticket revenues, according to the company’s S.E.C. filing.
Within days of a “yes” vote from the Angel Guild, the studio acquired “Sound of Freedom".
Finally released on July 4, 2023, "Sound of Freedom" didn’t spend quite 40 years in the wilderness, but by all rights, it never should have reached the Promised Land. 8 years in the can looking for a distributor is usually a death sentence for a movie, most sitting this long wind up as filler that HBO runs from midnight to six in the morning.
“Sound” has grossed over $85 million to date - even with the leftist, anti-religion, pedo-protecting media trying to kill it by associating it with QAnon. Since the principals of Angel Studios are Mormons, it shouldn't take long for hit pieces to appear as attacks on the LDS church itself.
There is no doubt some irony attached, in that the “Sound of Freedom” was once attached to Fox and Disney, studios that nearly put Angel Studios’ predecessor out of business with the VidAngel lawsuit.
And I would assume there is a healthy dose of schadenfreude mixed in there as well.
This is evidence that there is a G-d in Heaven!