The child-sex-trafficking drama starring Jim Caviezel made over $14.2 million on July 4 thanks to distributor Angel Studios' creative crowdfunding.
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But the film's real godsend is the ability for "Sound of Freedom" fans to buy movie tickets for complete strangers.
Angel Studios calls it "Pay It Forward," in which you can buy a ticket for "Sound of Freedom," pay for another one, and someone else can apply to redeem it if they don't have the financial means. A larger group of people buying tickets in bulk, such as for a company or a church, can even redeem a portion of their tickets for free. The distributor says of its $14.2 million haul, $2.6 million came from people overpaying through those Pay It Forward ticket sales.
While critics, interest groups, and political factions rage against the anti-child-trafficking drama, its distributor is laughing all the way to the bank.
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What is the Jim Caviezel–led action drama Sound of Freedom, exactly? A solid independent action film, which has made a surprising amount of money since its release on July 4? A moving true story about a real American hero? A dangerous gateway into misinformation and conspiracy? A gamble that's paid off beyond anyone's wildest expectations?
For director Alejandro Monteverde, the answer is simple: Sound of Freedom was a calling. He says he sat down to write the movie in 2017, after seeing a segment on an evening news show—"60 Minutes, 20/20, Dateline, I used to record them all"—about child trafficking. "I watched it and I couldn't sleep," he tells me in an interview. "I knew about human trafficking. I just didn't know about child trafficking for sexual exploitation."
The next day, he felt he needed to write a film about the issue. With cowriter Rod Barr, he spun a fully fictional screenplay called The Model, about a monied, free-wheeling guy who discovers an underground trade in sexually exploited children, then starts buying the kids back into safety. "If I'd kept making a complete fiction, I wouldn't have any of these attacks," the Mexico native says somewhat ruefully.
But that's not what happened. Instead, a producer on the still-nascent movie asked Monteverde if he'd heard of Tim Ballard, a former homeland security special agent who had started to make waves for a nonprofit he founded, Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), which reportedly had a hand in rescuing trafficked children. "So I Googled him," Monteverde says.
The online results were plentiful and included a glowing CBS News feature from 2014 on Operation Triple Take, a joint action between OUR and the Colombian government that reportedly rescued 123 trafficked people—55 of whom were children. "And I was like, Wow, I would love to meet this guy," Monteverde said. "So I met him and I saw that his story surpassed my fiction."
With Barr, he rewrote the script. Now the film would depict a heavily fictionalized take on the Colombian rescue from a few years before.
According to investigative journalist Lynn Packer, Ballard had long been seeking a wider platform for his and OUR's activities. In 2013, he and a group of filmmakers sought funding from conservative political commentator Glenn Beck for a reality series that would depict the rescue of trafficked children. Though the series never came to fruition, some members of the production team made a documentary about Ballard, released in 2016 and called The Abolitionists, that gave Ballard even more mainstream legitimacy. Soon, he was speaking at organizations like Google.
But according to Erin Albright, an attorney and longtime adviser to anti-trafficking task forces, Ballard and OUR aren't actually central to the international fight against human trafficking. "The majority of the [anti-trafficking] field views them as fringe," she tells me. "They peddle sensationalism…and they fundraise off it."
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With a self-stated mission to "amplify light" and a business model based on crowdfunded projects, Angel Studios might seem an unlikely fit for a movie about something as dark and hopeless as the sexual exploitation of children. But according to CEO Neal Harmon, it's a natural fit. "Sound of Freedom is first and foremost a thrilling hero's tale that keeps you on the edge of your seat," he tells VF. "When you leave, you leave with hope."
Harmon isn't just a film distributor. With his brothers—who are also Angel executives—he runs an advertising and marketing agency called Harmon Brothers, which has promoted brands like toilet odor spray Poo-Pourri and the defecation-assistance stool Squatty Potty. He's also the cofounder of VidAngel, a company that engaged in a years-long legal battle with Disney and Warner Brothers over the practice of removing so-called "objectionable content" from those studios' TV shows and movies, then streaming the altered properties to VidAngel's customers. (A settlement was reached in which VidAngel agreed to pay the studios $9.9 million.)
According to Harmon, there's little difference between selling a physical product like the Squatty Potty and "selling seats for a movie." That seat-selling strategy is arguably one of Sound of Freedom's most controversial elements. After Angel bought the film's distribution rights, the company added a call to action to its credits. It encourages patrons to help "raise awareness" of child trafficking—but instead of donating to anti-trafficking groups or even directly to Ballard's efforts, patrons are asked to "pay it forward" by purchasing additional tickets for the film. "We don't have big studio money to market this movie, but we have you," an out-of-character Caviezel says before a QR code appears onscreen.
Harmon declined to share how much money Sound of Freedom has made from actual butts in seats, and how much has come from the pay-it-forward revenue (which is tracked by a separate sales platform), but as of today, Sound of Freedom had made over $100 million—far in excess of all expectations. And rather than dropping with time, Sound of Freedom's profits continue to grow week over week, Harmon and Monteverde independently confirmed.
It's a level of success that frustrates trafficking survivor Jose Alfaro. Alfaro hasn't seen the film, but he's familiar with Ballard and OUR. He tells me that narratives like Sound of Freedom's, which present trafficking as a result of kidnapping that sends victims across borders, "aren't really representative of how more commonly this crime actually happens." Merlan agrees, saying the movie contributes to the false perception "that the problem of trafficking is best addressed by kicking down doors and carrying children out."
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