A Child-Trafficking Thriller Is Taking on Hollywood. Who’s Behind It?

The company behind the movie, Angel Studios, has a record of serving viewers with conservative tastes in entertainment and using a crowdfunding business model to do it. In the past few years, the company has had success with Bible-based stories, including “The Chosen,” a serialized drama about the life of Jesus, and more recently “His Only Son,” a theatrical film based on the Old Testament tale of Abraham. 

Now the studio is branching out with a gritty drama about child trafficking—a tough issue that is the focus of both international law-enforcement agencies and extreme conspiracy theorists. “Sound of Freedom” plays a bit like Liam Neeson’s “Taken” movies, but with less violence and a hero on a crusade that goes deeper than revenge. One of his lines is the movie’s slogan: “God’s children are not for sale.” 

The movie “is very important to society, but it’s also very important to Angel and what we’re trying to pull off as a company,” said chief executive Neal Harmon, 45, the eldest of four brothers who co-founded the studio. 

Angel’s leaders see opportunity in cinemas. Since the pandemic shook the movie industry, almost every theatrical release has come to seem like a Hail Mary. Studios are betting on big-budget crowd pleasers or low-cost genre flicks, especially horror. This leaves room to operate for releases targeting niche or underserved audiences. One of the few non-franchise, non-horror movies to succeed in cinemas recently was “Jesus Revolution,” a boomer-friendly film about hip Christians in the late ‘60s. The Lions Gate film grossed $52 million at the box office, and ranks in the top-25 releases of the year.     

“We realized that this black box that was the theatrical experience is now open to us,” said Angel Studios president Jordan Harmon, 32, the youngest of the sibling co-founders. 

A Family Business

Angel Studios, based in Provo, Utah, was born of direct conflict with Hollywood. In 2013, the Harmons, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, started a business centered on scrubbing nudity, profanity and other potentially offensive content from popular movies, and then streaming those filtered movies to customers online. Walt Disney and other major studios sued the startup, then known as VidAngel, for copyright infringement. After four years of court battle and a protective bankruptcy filing by VidAngel, the company settled with the studios in 2020, agreeing to pay them roughly $10 million. The Harmons sold off VidAngel, which is still operating under different ownership. 

In the wake of the settlement, the family members launched Angel Studios as a separate company. Instead of just cleaning up other studios’ content, they’d put out their own. Part of that plan? “We needed to focus our efforts on going after stories that Hollywood was rejecting,” Neal Harmon said.

“Dry Bar Comedy,” an online showcase for clean stand-up, was the company’s first hit. Next came “The Chosen,” which made its debut on the company’s streaming service in 2019. The series covered all its production costs through fan funding, amounting to more than $100 million for four seasons of the show.  

Angel has turned to the big screen in an effort to give its releases more cultural clout. The first release from the company’s new theatrical unit, “His Only Son,” came out over Easter. The film about Abraham wrestling with God’s command to sacrifice his son Isaac cost about $250,000 to produce. To distribute and market the film, Angel raised $1.2 million from 1,800 crowd investors. “His Only Son” opened at No. three at the box office behind big releases such as “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves,” and went on to gross nearly $13 million total.   

“Sound of Freedom” is the next big test for Angel’s crowdfunded slate. As such, it’s perhaps the only summer movie that went through the S.E.C. on its way to the multiplex. 

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. Some had previously backed “His Only Son” and had already received profit checks from that investment, Angel said.

As of June 29, “Sound of Freedom” has generated about $7.2 million in ticket presales, Angel said. The crowd investors who funded the movie’s release will be the first to get reimbursed from box-office revenues, the studio said in its filing. After that, the company says it will keep roughly one-third of potential revenues, with two-thirds going to the film’s producers, who have to repay separate investors that put up the $14.5 million cost of making the movie. 

Angel is hoping for a box-office splash July Fourth to prove that it can turn out fans for more than just Christian films. “We’re faith-friendly” but with a broader mandate to “tell stories that amplify light,” Jordan Harmon said.

The Man on a Mission

“Sound of Freedom” is based on the real-life work of Tim Ballard, a former Department of Homeland Security agent who founded an anti-trafficking group called Operation Underground Railroad. 

While Caviezel stars as Ballard, Mira Sorvino plays his wife, and veteran character actor Bill Camp plays his guide into the child slave trade in Latin America. After freeing a young Honduran boy from his captors, Caviezel’s character becomes obsessed with rescuing the boy’s sister, a mission that involves undercover stings and infiltrating a jungle hideout. 

Work on the script began eight years ago. The movie was largely shot in Colombia under director Alejandro Monteverde. In 2018, an international division of Fox made a deal for a future release in Latin America, said the film’s producer, Eduardo Verástegui. After Disney acquired Fox in 2019, the producer bought the movie back.

Given the international, pre-merger nature of the project, a Disney spokesperson said, the company’s studio division had no knowledge of the film.

“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.

The producer 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.

“There have been lots of personal opinions shared around this film by actors, producers and others. Those are opinions of their own and they’re free to speak as they choose to,” said Neal Harmon. “But what we find uniting about this film is that the subject matter is true, and we can all agree that children are worth fighting for.” 

Last March, Verástegui approached the Harmons 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. 

Within days of a “yes” vote from the Angel Guild, the studio acquired “Sound of Freedom,” moving quickly to attach a trailer for the movie to “His Only Son,” which hit theaters March 31. 

“Pay It Forward” Marketing

Angel has promoted “Sound of Freedom” on social media and in billboard, radio and TV ads. Religious and conservative media groups especially have rallied to the movie, and right-wing influencers have trumpeted it as a cause on social media, including accounts sharing a video endorsement from Mel Gibson.

In its marketing, the studio encourages ticket buyers to “pay it forward” by contributing extra money, framing that as a way to raise awareness about child-trafficking. The studio says it uses that pot to offer free tickets to people, but declined to say how much money or ticket activity that effort has generated so far. 

In a message that will play in theaters during the movie’s final credits, Caviezel urges viewers to scan a QR link to contribute, saying, “We don’t have big studio money to market this movie, but we have you.” 

“The Chosen” set a high bar for success with investment rounds, pay-it-forward contributions and other crowdfunding methods. The TV series, created by writer-director Dallas Jenkins, also spawned several “Chosen” event specials in movie theaters that grossed about $34 million, according to Comscore.

In 2022, Angel lost the exclusive rights to distribute the show. Though Angel still licenses “The Chosen” on its streaming platform, the show’s owners launched a separate streaming app and signed a new distribution deal with Lions Gate, which has sold the show to the CW television network and other outlets.  

When asked about the long-term viability of Angel’s theatrical plan, Jenkins questioned how many times the studio could go back to its core audience to fund future releases, but he noted an advantage.   

“There may be a ceiling on how successful [the model] can be, but the floor is pretty solid because they’re not spending much money up front,” Jenkins said. 

Angel executives see some irony in “Sound of Freedom” once being attached to Fox and Disney, studios that nearly put them out of business with the VidAngel lawsuit. 

“And now,” Neal Harmon said, “we’re the ones distributing this film.”

Write to John Jurgensen at John.Jurgensen@wsj.com