July 4th 2023, the Sound of Freedom day

There’s a faith based drama about child trafficking called Sound of Freedom opening today, in the middle of Summer escapist tentpole season, on one of the sketchiest Holiday’s of the year; and it might win the day at the boxoffice.

Sounds a lot like one of my ‘anyway….’ lines in this email, but it’s absolutely true, and how it’s happening is something you should be paying attention to.

You might remember the situation with VidAngel around 2015, a Provo based company that altered content to remove racier parts so there were no ’surprises’ when watching content with kids. The studios sued and eventually shut them down (for non internally created content), but after the settlement they morphed into Angel Studios and started leveraging the Faith based community they built with the VidAngel platform and crowdfunded a couple of projects. One of the first projects was The Chosen, a TV series which launched on the VidAngel platform and it became a viral sensation; and by the time they got to Season 3, the debuted Episodes 1 and 2 theatrically and it grossed $8.8 million in 3 days. But it was the crowdfunding aspect that seemed to drive it since the audience has financial interest. How much interest? A year ago they had 50,000 individual investors and it’s probably grown since. They seem to have taken this one step beyond the idea of crowdfunding, they’ve taken a group of psychographically similar consumers and created a subscription service, or maybe even more like a club.

We saw the same effect a few years back when Fox Searchlight released the crowdfunded Super Troopers 2 to a $15 million weekend, and as an example of what was driving that gross, $8 million of that $15 million 3 day was on Friday.

But what’s going on today is just mind blowing considering what the film is, and other than having Freedom in the title, makes no sense on 4th of July. This just goes to show you that sometimes people who have no experience can accomplish something when they don’t know what the rules are. Looking at today’s grosses, and trying to guess what they did last night, they will probably report the highest gross of the day. Yep, they might beat Indy today (or at least come very close). Of course, that’s using the usual distribution math where it’s actually two days vs one, but this looks like it’s gonna be $10 million or more for the two days. And they didn’t spend a dime on TV.

We’ll have to see what this does this weekend, and sometimes these films can be one day wonders, but the crowdfunding model has announced itself loud and clear today.

Have a great 4th!