Like any good proselytizer, Angel Studios is taking the good news global.
The Utah-based upstart, which combines a focus on underserved faith-based audiences with crowdfunding and digital marketing innovation to deliver indie hits Sound of Freedom and King of Kings, is rapidly scaling its international operations ahead of a planned IPO.
Angel Studios co-founder and chief content officer Jeffrey Harmon was in London this week for a gala screening on Sunday of episodes one and two of Testament, a new Biblically-inspired British series which Angel is rolling out together with its U.K. partner Kova Releasing.
Directed by Paul Syrstad, Testament is a modern-day, London-set adaptation of the Acts of the Apostles, the fifth book of the New Testament, which recounts the early history of the Christian church. It’s the latest Angel Studios release under its recently-announced deal with Kova, following King of Kings, an animated film on the life of Jesus Christ featuring the voices of Kenneth Branagh, Uma Thurman and Mark Hamill; and Bonhoeffer, a biopic on the German Lutheran pastor and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Earlier this year, Angel unveiled similar output deals with distributors across Europe, Latin America and Asia, including with Saje Distribution in France, Kinostar in Germany and Rialto for Australia and New Zealand. The company now has distribution deals in place for a large chunk of the world, from Brazil (with Paris Films), to English-speaking West Africa (Filmone) to Sri Lanka (Skyline Entertainment).
The bulk of Angel’s business is still in the U.S., but hits like Sound of Freedom, which grossed more than $66 million of its $250 million box office tally internationally and King of Kings, which has so far earned upwards of $6 million on international release, including $1.5 million in Brazil alone, point to the global potential of the studio’s model. On June 16, Angel Studios will receive the inaugural “Breakout Distributor of the Year” award at industry conference CineEurope, honoring the company’s “exponential impact on the theatrical industry by their unwavering authenticity, producing content that resonates with its audience.”
The King of Kings
“It’s a worldwide beat,” Harmon tells The Hollywood Reporter, speaking of the faith-based audience. “There’s like an allergic reaction to faith in Hollywood, and it shouldn’t be. Look at King of Kings, which has $67 million at the box office so far. Look at [Biblical TV series] House of David, which was the number one show on Amazon Prime. The faith market is a big, big market, and that’s the reason why we’re a faith-friendly studio.”
Harmon, together with his brothers Neal, Daniel and Jordan Harmon, and cousin Benton Crane, launched Angel Studios back in 2023 as a “family-friendly” alternative to mainstream distributors.
“We were just trying to build a system to create the kind of product we wanted for our families,” says Harmon, who, like his brothers, is a Mormon. “I have six kids, and I want them to grow up with the kind of films and TV series that Hollywood just doesn’t make anymore. We created the studio to bring these films into existence.”
Among the company’s indie innovations is its Angel Guild program, in which members pay a monthly fee for access to the studio’s releases as well as a vote in the greenlighting of future films and TV series, and Angel Funding, a regulated crowdfunding platform for approved projects. In many territories, audiences can also use the company’s Pay it Forward booking system, where people can buy and then donate movie tickets for others to use.
The Angel Guild, which counted around 250,000 members in late 2023, now boasts more than 1.2 million people from 155 countries. “All of them voting on all the projects that come into Angel studios and funding them as well,” says Harmon.
Angel Studios’ model includes a standard back-end deal for filmmakers, in contrast to the buy-out model common on Netflix and other streamers, which includes a percentage of revenues earned on their site, based on watch time for a film or show per month as a percentage of the entire watch time for all the content available.
It hasn’t been all smooth sailing for Angel Studios. The company was born out of the collapse of the Harmon Brothers’ previous endeavor, VidAngel, which distributed versions of Hollywood studio films, edited to make them “family-friendly.” In 2016, the majors, including Disney, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox and Lucasfilm, filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit against VidAngel, alleging copyright violation. The studios won $62.4 million in damages, eventually reduced to a $9.9 million settlement after VidAngel filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Rebranded as Angel Studios in 2021, the company shifted focused to producing and distributing original content through equity crowdfunding. Despite this pivot, Angel Studios has encountered further legal disputes, notably with the producers of Biblically-themed TV series The Chosen, which resulted in an arbitration ruling that Angel Studios breached its contract and was ordered to pay $5 million in fees and costs. Early this year, Slingshot Pictures filed a lawsuit against Angel Studios over alleged contract breaches related to the animated film David.
Angel Studios plans to release eight films in theaters this year. Currently on release, alongside King of Kings, are The Last Rodeo, from Fried Green Tomatoes director Jon Avnet and starring Neal McDonough, which has past $11 million domestically; and Rule Breakers, Bill Guttentag’s true-life tale of an all-girls robotics team from Afghanistan, which has earned $3 million in theatrical release to date.
Upcoming features include Zero A.D., the next film from Sound of Freedom director Alejandro Monteverde, a retelling of the Biblical story of Mary and Joseph, and the first in Monteverde’s overall deal with Angel that will see him direct 5 to 10 theatrical films for the studio over the next decade.
Zero A.D. aside, Angel’s slate is light on overtly religious themes. There’s not a Bible lesson in sight in Seth Worley’s Sketch, a warm-hearted audience favorite at last year’s Toronto Film Festival, which bows in August. Angel’s Christmas Day release, The Stranger’s Case, from Lone Survivor producer Brandt Andersen, is the story of a pediatric surgeon and her daughter, set against the backdrop of the Syrian Civil War. Solo Mio, which Angel will release theatrically next February, is a rom-com starring Kevin James as a groom who gets left at the altar and decides to go on his planned Italian honeymoon alone. Young Washington, a biopic on the early years of the first U.S. President, currently shooting in the U.K., will bow on July 4.
Sketch
Courtesy of TIFF
“A little less than half of our our films and TV series have faith elements in them,” says Harmon. “We’re primarily a family-friendly platform with a faith-friendly side to it.”
Harmon says Angel is modifying its international distribution strategy according to local market demands, noting the “big differences” in audience demographics worldwide compared to the U.S., with its large Protestant Evangelical audience.
“Europe is a more secular market generally, for example, versus Brazil, which is, by population, is much more faith-focused,” he notes. “There, they embrace the faith films more so than even the U.S. does.”
Angel Studio’s international partners include a mix of faith-based distributors, like Kova in the U.K. and France’s Saje Distribution, and secular ones, including Germany’s Kinostar and A Contracorriente in Spain.
“In markets where it makes sense, where the best performers are faith-based, that’s great, but in markets where its better to have a different type of distributor, we’ll do that,” says Harmon. “For us, it’s primarily about performance.”
That same focus is being brought to Angel’s small-screen slate, which ranges from the post-apocalyptic drama Homestead — recently renewed for a second season — to fantasy series The Wayfinders, featuring Pirates of the Caribbean actor Mackenzie Crook, to the Irish cartoon Tuttle Twins, to Fellowship, from Testament director Syrstad, about the friendship, and shared faith, between fantasy writers J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings) and C.S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia).
“There are faith titles in our slate, but The Wayfinders is not faith, Tuttle Twins is not faith,” Harmon notes. “Anything that gets too pigeonholed into one specific faith, like dogma, is not going to make it. There has to be a story with a strong, broad and general appeal.”
While not abandoning its religious roots, Harmon says Angel Studios is “100 percent focused on growth” as it prepares to go public. Last year, the company announced plans for an IPO via Southport Acquisition Corp, a blank check SPAC, in a deal valued at $1.6 billion. There is still no date for the IPO.
