Angel Studios: questioning the hype

By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Sep 03, 2024

The most significant development in Christian filmmaking these past few years has been the rise of Angel Studios. Angel Studios began as a rebranding of VidAngel, a family-friendly streaming service akin to ClearPlay. Yet in just a few years since 2020, and despite its small output, the Mormon-run company has become a household name among Christians. Once known for streaming censored edits of Hollywood movies, Angel Studios has suddenly acquired a reputation as the cutting edge of religious cinema.

Catholics, too, have joined in the enthusiasm. Based on the strength of Angel’s first two high-profile releases, The Chosen and Sound of Freedom, many had high expectations for the biopic of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini that was released in March. When I opined that Cabrini did a disservice to the saint’s memory, some people responded with surprise that Angel Studios in particular would fail in such a project; it was at this point that I became interested in the question of how this company managed to build such trust in a short time.

It’s also striking in that, contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, Angel Studios did not make the movies and shows mentioned above: up to this point, it has not been a studio strictly speaking, but a distribution company. Even as a movie critic, I rarely think about which studio produced a new film I’m going to see, let alone who distributed it. Back in the Golden Age of Hollywood, when actors had exclusive contracts with studios and had to be loaned out to appear in another company’s production, average viewers may have been more conscious of whether something was a Columbia or an MGM picture. But today, the only other distributor I can think of that has made a name with the general public is A24, with its “arthouse horror” brand.

To gain a better understanding of the current landscape of religious filmmaking, then, it’s worth asking how Angel Studios made such a name for itself—and whether it deserves the confidence many Catholic viewers have placed in it. Let’s begin with a look at the three releases that have done most for its reputation: The Chosen, Sound of Freedom, and Cabrini.

The Chosen

The Chosen was Angel’s breakout hit, and in my opinion, their one truly significant release on an artistic and spiritual level. It is the only work of its kind in the history of religious filmmaking—a multi-season series about the Apostles, artistically inspired by the prestige dramas of TV’s Golden Age as much as by prior religious films.

The Chosen is far from perfect, but had enough astonishing moments to keep me watching its first four seasons. The writing is at times strong but is trapped in the bad habits of today’s popular movies and TV: too many wry, self-aware quips (especially for a show about holy things), over-explanation failing to respect the viewer’s intelligence, and subplots driven by contrived interpersonal drama.

On the formal level, showrunner Dallas Jenkins, keen to match the visual creativity of shows like Breaking Bad, can be seen continually stretching his cinematographic vocabulary, in contrast with many Christian movies which seem content to be generically “well-produced” (more on that later). Such risk-taking is praiseworthy and necessary for the growth of Christian cinema as a legitimately artistic medium.

Beyond those merits, the show’s most consistent artistic and spiritual strength is Jonathan Roumie’s performance as Jesus. A friend once said to me the seemingly effortless presence of Roumie’s portrayal “likely functions as some viewers’ first encounter with the person of Christ in a manner similar to contemplative prayer.” The show has inspired more than a few conversions. This genuine grace has not been communicated without the mediation of the visible Church in a Catholic actor, who regularly uses his fame outside the show to promote the Catholic faith, Catholic prayers, and belief in the Eucharist.

The Chosen is, of course, not a Catholic show; while I count only one instance of outright heresy, it evinces the limitations of an Evangelical Protestant mindset, so that one not infrequently thinks, “A Catholic would not have written it this way.” I also wonder if the realistic medium of film, biased in favor of what is visible, may be at a fundamental disadvantage in depicting the God-man; and I see danger that a seven-season-long treatment could end up dominating the religious imagination of the viewer.

For these inherent formal reasons as much as for the show’s theological flaws, I am concerned about using The Chosen with children or for catechesis. God can certainly use a Protestant-written show to draw people to Him, but Catholics have two thousand years of artistic and spiritual resources on which to draw; children in the Faith are owed their own authentic patrimony.

[See our reviews of The Chosen on Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast—Season 1—Season 2—Season 3]

What might The Chosen tell us about Angel Studios? To give due credit, The Chosen would not exist without Angel, who showed vision in giving the show a chance, and out-of-the-box-thinking in assisting its crowdfunding with the innovative Pay It Forward viewing model. However, Angel had no creative input that would account for the show’s strengths and weaknesses, and even its business involvement ended after season three, when tensions over how those monies were distributed finally resulted in the severing of relations between The Chosen LLC and Angel Studios. (I will have more to say about Angel’s business practices later.) Going forward, Angel no longer has a part in the series that made its name, the only project of theirs that has been a mainstream success both critically and in viewer numbers.

Sound of Freedom

To understand Angel Studios’ reputation and success, their approach to business must be considered as much as the quality of their releases. Having reviewed Sound of Freedom and Cabrini as films elsewhere, I will focus here on their relation to Angel’s marketing, perception, and crowdfunding.

Sound of Freedom, which tells the story of anti-child-trafficking operative Tim Ballard, was to me a decent thriller with a strong first act and some nice noir-like visuals. The movie was made by a Catholic team (director, producer, co-writer, and star), but the real-life Ballard is a Mormon; understandably, references to the movie Ballard’s denomination were terse and unspecified, with the compensation of a memorable tagline, “God’s children are not for sale”.

Everyone knows this film was dishonestly trashed by many mainstream critics for political reasons; in truth, the movie itself was not political, nor did it feature QAnon conspiracy theories—indeed, director Alejandro Monteverde publicly complained that Jim Caviezel’s bizarre comments at QAnon events “hurt my work”.

The box office told a very different story, and if Sound of Freedom’s poor critical reception was due more to politics than to an objective evaluation of the film, I think it’s fair to say that its grassroots success benefited just as much from a kind of moral inflation. The promotional campaign gave the impression that to see this movie was in itself a virtuous act which would help to save children. The evident bad faith of the critics only convinced Angel’s target demographic that the film was of the utmost social importance. Nor did the movie lack an army of online supporters ready to accuse even the most reasonable and fair critics of running cover for pedophiles.

Jim Caviezel’s approach to promoting the movie ran along similar lines. On Steve Bannon’s podcast, the actor, with his increasingly unsettling affect, seemed to guilt his listeners into seeing the film, claiming that (I paraphrase) people don’t want to see it because they know if they do see it, they won’t do anything about the problem of child trafficking. I found this frustrating rather than motivating: I already know child trafficking is real and evil, so why not tell me what I can do about it, rather than accusing me of lacking the will to fight unless I watch your action thriller? Even when Caviezel (whose sincerity I do not doubt) appeared in the film’s post-credits message to give a pep talk to the audience, there was no practical call to action, not even a suggestion to donate to some anti-trafficking organization, but only a QR code to buy someone else a ticket to see Sound of Freedom.

The other controversy over the film, bearing directly on its claims of moral importance, was the questionable veracity of Tim Ballard, the real-life anti-trafficking operative played by Caviezel. There had already been credible arguments that Ballard’s claims about the effectiveness of his South American sting operations were exaggerated for publicity (and more investigation on this point since). At the time, I was willing to suspend judgment and enjoy Sound of Freedom as a story. But just after the film’s release, Ballard was forced out of his own anti-trafficking organization after multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints disciplined Ballard for having used his name to give the false impression that his organization had official backing from the church, while Glenn Beck, who with Ballard had co-founded an organization to fund the supposed rescues, came to the conclusion that he had been “completely duped” by his friend.

In retrospect, with Ballard increasingly discredited, the moral hype about seeing Sound of Freedom to save the children appears absurd, while at least some of the hostile reporting around the film has been vindicated. Most of the film’s and Ballard’s promoters in conservative media, however, have been quiet about these unedifying developments. A silver lining: Alabama signed a “Sound of Freedom Act” raising the mandatory sentence for first-degree human trafficking of minors, showing that even a fraud can inspire good deeds.

As alluded to above, Sound of Freedom continued an important throughline of Angel’s business model: they took the brilliantly effective Pay It Forward system developed on streaming for The Chosen and applied it to a theatrical release. “Paying it forward” is, ostensibly, donating so that one or more free tickets will be given to strangers who otherwise couldn’t afford to see the film.

For a while, it was an open question how much Sound of Freedom’s financial success was due to conventional ticket sales versus people “paying it forward”. On the day of the film’s release, about a fifth of ticket purchases came from the Pay It Forward system. Early in the theatrical run, there were reports that not all of these tickets were actually being used: that is, there were large numbers of empty seats in nominally sold-out theaters, indicating that there were more tickets being purchased than there were people actually seeing the movie. It is unclear how widespread this phenomenon was; regardless, in the final analysis Angel claimed that there was about $25 million in Pay It Forward receipts—about a tenth of the global box office (whether included in or added to that total is unclear).

Cabrini

For Catholics who had been enjoying Angel’s offerings up to this point, Cabrini promised a climax. The Chosen was great but not Catholic enough; Sound of Freedom was made by Catholics but not about a Catholic; Cabrini would be the first fully Catholic movie from Angel Studios!

If Sound of Freedom was a critical failure and a financial hit, Cabrini (made by the same director and screenwriter) was the reverse. Angel Studios tried hard to replicate the sense of social importance and relevance they had with Sound of Freedom; there was some transparent astroturfing to give the film the appearance of being countercultural. Big, secular conservative or “anti-woke liberal” Twitter accounts like Libs of TikTok, people you wouldn’t expect to be interested in a Catholic saint, were boosting the film (some admitting this was paid promotion), using similar language to the effect that “you know the left-wing media and Hollywood will hate it.” Aside from the indifference to artistic value conveyed when a work is marketed in this way, these claims were rather unconvincing given that the “left-wing media” were at that very moment praising Cabrini, resulting in a 90% Rotten Tomatoes score in contrast with Sound of Freedom’s 57%.

The truth about the film, meanwhile, was to be found not in the fake word of mouth on Twitter, but in its trailers playing up the feminist angle (one of them actually used Shania Twain’s “Man, I Feel Like a Woman”). Yet neither astroturfing nor critical success nor Pay It Forward saved the film from underperforming, as it recouped 20 million dollars in theaters against the reported 40-50 million it cost to make.

Having already written at length on this movie, I will only repeat that in my opinion Cabrini was not at all the outstanding saint film many hoped Angel would produce—it was less truly religious even than Sound of Freedom, which was about a Mormon and hardly mentioned religion at all. Incidentally, one thing agreed upon by all those waiting in hope for the new Catholic cinema is that it must not be preachy. Yet Sound of Freedom and Cabrini are unmistakably preachy—just not about religion.

To return to the central question of this article: I believe it was not the minimal religious aspect of Sound of Freedom which gave Catholics such confidence in Angel Studios when Cabrini came along. Rather, the furor over Sound of Freedom (perhaps unintended but exploited by Angel) gave the impression that they were willing to be countercultural in the face of vicious media opposition, giving us “the kind of films Hollywood won’t make”—almost as though Angel were the studio equivalent of Jim Caviezel himself, well known to have been blacklisted in Hollywood after making The Passion of the Christ. For Cabrini, Angel tried to capitalize further on that anti-Hollywood reputation in some quarters, while simultaneously playing up the Hollywood-friendly feminist angle in the trailers.

As for the filmmakers themselves, their stated intent was for Cabrini to be basically palatable to secular sensibilities. Nor, for that matter, had director Monteverde wanted Sound of Freedom to be so controversial, as was clear from his complaint about Caviezel.

Arguably, the message sent by Cabrini is that Angel Studios’ real goal is not to make great countercultural films, but to make films that will draw a Christian audience while also having mainstream credibility. Which is quite another thing.

Yet there is at least one thing I love about Cabrini: the proceeds from the film were given to widows and orphans.

Artistic costs of Angel’s business model

One anomaly of Angel Studios’ reputation is that they receive the kind of good will usually reserved for non-profits—yet it’s essential to keep in mind that they are very much a for-profit business.

A key factor in Angel Studios’ success has been the Pay It Forward business model, a brilliant twist on traditional crowdfunding. A number of Angel collaborators, however, have come away with the sense that there is something sketchy about Pay It Forward. Above, I mentioned the split between The Chosen LLC and Angel Studios over the distribution of crowdfunding. More concretely troubling is the byzantine and possibly illegal structure of overlapping corporations involved in Angel’s crowdfunding, as revealed by Ashley Bratcher (the actress who played Abby Johnson in the 2019 movie Unplanned). Bratcher had entered into a deal with Angel to distribute her documentary Pharma, but after a year and a half successfully terminated their contract for reasons of fraudulent conduct.

Another issue detailed alongside Bratcher’s revelations is that the language around the Pay It Forward system gives patrons the impression that their money is being used to buy a ticket for someone else—in fact, it turns out that Angel may or may not use the money for that purpose.

Rather than dwell on the ethical and legal aspects here, though, I’d like to consider the potential artistic costs of Angel’s approach to fundraising and marketing.

Why have so many people been motivated to pay into a system so someone else can watch a movie or show for free? Because they believe it represents an important cause. In the case of The Chosen, fans paid it forward to spread the Gospel. With Sound of Freedom, many were convinced that this was not just good art, but so socially important that it was urgent for as many people as possible to see it. Likewise, anyone who paid it forward for Cabrini did so because they believed it would be, to use a catchword, impactful.

Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with the idea of paying it forward to spread a show based on the Gospel. Just as obviously, though, the model does not apply equally well to every project. Viewers are not likely to Pay It Forward just so that a stranger can have an evening’s entertainment. Nor are many likely to do so out of love of art for art’s sake. For Pay It Forward to work, Angel Studios needs to convince a large number of people that the project will be “impactful” on an even larger number of people—that with the right support, it will be able to reach a mass audience and effect real social change.

Remember, though, that this is a for-profit company: “impactful” is essential to Angel Studios’ business model, not just to its social mission. If a movie weren’t “impactful”, for instance, then urging grandma to buy tickets for a bunch of strangers would just be greedy.

To be fair, sometimes a project has broad appeal, genuinely positive social impact, and artistic quality—there is a reason it was The Chosen, and not some stereotypically bad Christian movie, that established Pay It Forward as a viable system. But viewing everything through the lens of “impact” tends to limit the sort of projects that will be made and marketed. It likely won’t be enough for a work to be socially important in an indirect or patient or subtle or quiet way, the way any good art is—it has to be socially impactful in a way that is loud, broad, and obvious, if not like a stereotypical Christian movie, then like an Oscar-bait movie about civil rights.

Even with best-case results, overprivileging “socially impactful” material impoverishes cinema: not every movie is called to be the next Selma. But given the added disadvantage of our unfashionable beliefs, we are likely enough to get movies like Cabrini, more concerned with appealing to a mass audience on secular terms than with doing justice to their subject matter.

The idol of high production value

It’s not uncommon to see pessimistic Catholics bashing a new religious movie without having seen it. Sometimes it’s unfair, while sometimes it’s based on solid information. When the norm of Christian cinema is rarely good, we can be quick to assume the worst. Strangely, though, the reverse phenomenon appeared around the release of Cabrini: people who hadn’t seen the movie vigorously defending it against critics who had seen it! There was a strange sense of loyalty owed to the product: Things are finally getting good—don’t mess it up by complaining!

The hype around Angel Studios is, above all, imbued with the sense that “our time has finally come.” Setting aside the question of what demographic this “our” really is—of whether Catholics in particular should put their cinematic hopes in Angel—it’s worth asking what defines this new moment for religious movies. What is this trajectory, perceived by some as so overwhelmingly positive that to focus on the negatives would be mere quibbling?

If you ask a fan why he thinks Angel Studios represents a great new moment in religious cinema, you might hear something like, “Christians are finally making real movies”. What is a real movie? A real movie has acting that isn’t totally corny; a real movie has nice lighting. A real movie must have “high production value”; essentially, it must look like a mainstream Hollywood movie.

Some frustration directed at Cabrini’s critics seems to have come from the following beliefs: “High production value”, which has been absent from most explicitly Christian narrative films until recently, is of paramount importance. For the sake of this good, many other flaws should be overlooked. If a “high-production-value” movie about a saint is playing in theaters, we should be grateful for it, and strong criticism risks setting back this much-desired progress of Christian cinema.

To be clear, there is a real good to be celebrated when a movie, or a community of filmmakers, achieves a certain level of craft. However, high production value is not a particular look, but is relative to the goal sought after. Whereas when the average viewer says he wants “high production value”, he really means something more specific: a commercial or mainstream aesthetic which often becomes an illusory metric for cinematic quality.

When it comes to visuals, there is a certain gloss or a surface-level competence that is easily detected by even unschooled viewers; it is sometimes referred to as “money on the screen”. This might mean flashy set pieces, or it might be as simple as the inclusion of certain elements too expensive or logistically complex for amateurs to pull off: shooting with lenses standard on commercial productions, using dollies and cranes for moving and high-angle shots. If a production can meet the latest commercial standards in lighting, coloring, and sound mixing, the result looks like the kind of movie that normally comes out of Hollywood, and is therefore “real”.

What is commonly called high production value, then, can be less about making something substantially good and more about being accepted as credible or respectable—about meeting the bar, not exceeding it.

Intelligent viewers may disagree on the right balance between “high production value” (in the commercial sense) and other cinematic goods. But it must not become an idol to which more substantive concerns are sacrificed. When critics are expected to swallow their religious or artistic concerns so that the commercial success of the latest obligatory-to-support Christian movie may go unimpeded—then it becomes clear that we are being held hostage to “production value”.

If a convincing commercial aesthetic indicates the achievement of a certain level of craft, however, the reverse is not true: “low production value” doesn’t necessarily mean poor craft. Here is where we benefit from familiarity with an array of masterpieces from outside the Hollywood tradition—indeed, most of the best religious films have not been American. To take two films by Roberto Rossellini, The Flowers of St. Francis and Journey to Italy do not (and did not even in the 1950s) strike anyone as having “high production value”. Flowers is rough and raw and uses non-professional actors; Journey has little “money on the screen”. However, they are placed by secular and religious critics alike among the greatest films ever made.

If Catholic filmmakers want to do something that lasts, and if Catholic viewers want to be fit to receive it, they need exposure to the wide range of approaches in the masterpieces of world cinema. (This is one reason we started Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast.) America is a Protestant country, so why should Catholic movies draw inspiration only from Hollywood and not from cinema from the Catholic cultures of France and Italy? Some will respond that they want to make movies accessible to the Hollywood-trained audience of today. Fine—but directors like Coppola, Scorsese, and Lucas revitalized Hollywood in part because they did not simply imitate Hollywood standards but synthesized them with influences from beyond that scene—including the French New Wave, 1950s Japanese cinema, and American avant-garde movements. And they led, rather than merely following, their public.

This is not snobbery opposed to the Hollywood style. Sometimes a film needs a glossy look. What is more important, however, is that it be truthful, in the sense that its style does not betray its subject matter. The Flowers of St. Francis is considered the best movie about that saint in part because its poverty and simplicity are so well-matched to the Franciscan spirit. Catholic filmmakers must not let their vocation be suborned by facile dogmas about high production value. Like St. Francis, they must practice poverty of spirit—by which I mean not necessarily a low budget, but a holy indifference to the cinematic “pride of life”, the totems of commercial respectability.

Have Christian movies changed?

Even if we accept the centrality of high production value, I wonder whether Angel Studios’ releases really represent such a great leap forward. Cabrini does not strike me as conspicuously better-crafted than, say, the 2020 film Fatima—yet for some reason, Fatima did not generate nearly the amount of buzz that Cabrini did. Likewise, is Cabrini such a dramatic improvement over the frequently-cited Catholic films that have been coming out sporadically ever since the success of The Passion of the Christ—movies like Restless Heart, There Be Dragons, and For Greater Glory?

One difference accounting for the excitement is that in contrast with the slow trickle of new religious films initiated by The Passion, Angel Studios seems to promise a much greater volume, consistency and frequency of releases—the dependable release of a big new Christian movie at least once a year from a studio primarily focused on our demographic, instead of every few years from a faith-based department in an otherwise secular studio.

The other difference is that while Cabrini may not be better than films like Fatima, it had better marketing. Before Angel Studios, the Harmon Brothers made viral ads for products like Squatty Potty and Poo-Pourri. I still remember the clever VidAngel ads I saw on Facebook years ago. The Harmons’ experience with VidAngel, which was sued by several major Hollywood studios for copyright infringement, helped them to develop their signature marketing skill: turning attacks and criticism into good publicity.

The new Christian film economy

Neither Sound of Freedom nor Cabrini was made with Angel Studios in mind, but both ended up there. Now, though, Angel is beginning to function more as a traditional studio, generating specific deals with core talent such as actor Neal McDonough and director Alejandro Monteverde, the latter of whom has entered into a lucrative contract to make five films for Angel in the next ten years.

Whatever one thinks of the quality of recent Christian films, there is certainly an ongoing boom in the religious market. In 2023, mainstream distributor Lionsgate’s Jesus Revolution become its highest-grossing film since 2019—perhaps riding the wave of The Chosen’s popularity by casting Jonathan Roumie in the lead role. The success of Angel Studios and above all, The Chosen, has made bigger companies like Amazon take note and try to get a piece of the Christian demographic.

This wave of interest creates new opportunities for religious filmmakers, not necessarily to put their eggs into Angel’s (or Amazon’s) basket, but to set up shop for themselves and do something better. If nothing else, Angel Studios’ example can inspire them to think outside the box about how to get films out there (while avoiding any business and marketing practices that may be exploitative or artistically detrimental).

Meanwhile, Angel Studios’ track record may not warrant too much optimism about its place in the future of Christian cinema. Yet in general, the only fair way to judge art is on a case-by-case basis. Angel Studios showed vision in distributing and crowdfunding The Chosen; there is nothing to prevent them from producing something as good or better in the future. It all depends on their values, and, if they are truly in the business of making art, on their willingness to take artistic risks—and on Christian viewers’ willingness to take risks as well.