Conservative Audiences Boost Summer’s Most Unlikely Hit Movie
By Amanda Coopersmith, July 14, 2023
The faith-based action film “Sound of Freedom” just topped $50 million at the box office this week, making it one of the summer’s most unlikely hits.
Distributed by the “family-friendly” media platform Angel Studios, “Sound of Freedom” has been widely promoted and supported by the conservative media and right-wing pundits thanks to its Christian themes and focus on the latest conservative moral panic, child sex trafficking. The film has been celebrated as a major win for conservative moviegoers who feel alienated by Hollywood’s “woke” agenda.
The 135-minute film is based on the story of Tim Ballard, a Mormon former U.S. Homeland Security agent who was called by God to leave his job busting sex trafficking rings to start a nonprofit saving trafficked children. Ballard is played by Jim Caviezel, who formerly starred as Jesus in Mel Gibson’s controversial 2004 film, “The Passion of the Christ.” In “Sound of Freedom,” Caviezel retains a Messianic quality as he righteously proclaims, “God’s children are not for sale” as he races across South America searching for a young Honduran girl named Rocio who has been sold into sex slavery.
The film was allegedly shelved by Disney after the company acquired 21st Century Fox in 2019, fueling right-wing comments about a Disney coverup and Hollywood’s refusal to touch a politicized and “too-hot topic.” Daily Mail said the film’s success “repudiates the model of Hollywood gatekeeping which has kept the low-budget thriller about the global child-trafficking trade out of theaters for nearly a decade.”
Disney has not commented on why the movie was shelved, but Ballard’s nonprofit Operation Underground Railroad (O.U.R) has come under fire several times since it was founded in 2014. An international human rights expert said that the organization’s sting operations fail to meet “even the most basic standards of supervision and accountability” and reveal “an alarming lack of understanding about how sophisticated criminal trafficking networks must be approached and dismantled.” After O.U.R’s 2020 donations topped $45M, Vice reported that after six years, the organization’s busts remained disorganized, relied on illegitimate sources, and invited untrained donors and civilians to participate in raids.
Reception Across the Political Spectrum
On the right, The American Thinker lauded the film for exposing “a great evil lurking in our land – child sex trafficking” which the reviewer attributed to the “growing perversion of this world” caused by illegal immigration, the destruction of the nuclear family, abortion, and pornography.
“While the rich and powerful try to indoctrinate us with critical race theory and other ideological moralisms, true victims suffer in literal cages and chains,” said a reviewer for The Federalist. “Children have been freed from chains due to the efforts of people like Ballard.”
Meantime, reviews by The Guardian, Jezebel, and Rolling Stone attacked the film for being “Q-Anon adjacent,” in part due to both Ballard and Caviezel’s real-world comments around fringe QAnon theories – the former, for refusing to condemn child-trafficking conspiracies and the latter for spouting an incoherent stream of fringe conspiracies during interviews leading up to the movie’s release.
In an interview on the podcast “Bannon’s War Room,” Caviezel claimed Biden didn’t really run our country, discussed the adrenochrome conspiracy, and openly supported QAnon.
“Do you know what Q really means? It means question,” said Caviezel. “Well, that seems like a good thing.”
However, the Guardian admitted that “these zestier strains of scaremongering” aren’t in the film itself, leading the right to call the review a shill, with many questioning why the left wing media so desperately wants to take down a movie focused on the crime of child sex trafficking.
Crowdfunding Business Model
The film’s distributor, Angel Studios, is a crowdfunding media startup that raises money for projects through small investments from thousands of everyday investors. Epoch Times called Angel Studios “an alternative to woke entertainment.” The startup does not explicitly claim to be faith-based – the company says its mission is simply to produce “stories that amplify light” – though it is best known for the show “The Chosen,” a Bible-based series about the life of Jesus.
The success of “Sound of Freedom” can be attributed to several variables: support from conservative celebrities like Elon Musk and Ivanka Trump; its crowdfunding model, which creates grassroots support from investors and the right wing community; the use of pay-it-forward technology that allows moviegoers to buy additional tickets for others; and a strong marketing campaign to sell two million presale tickets to represent “the two million children who are trafficked each year.”
Amanda Coopersmith is a Stanford-techie-turned-journalist who writes at the intersections of tech, gender, LGBTQ+ issues, and politics. She is a Master’s student in Cultural Reporting and Criticism at NYU Journalism. @acoopersmith4
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Actor Jim Caviezel (above), who plays a former Homeland Security Agent who saves trafficked children, stoked controversy for the film with a number of eye-raising comments including support of Q’Anon and fringe conspiracy theories. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)
