Passion of the Christ star Jim Caviezel is leading another faith-based event film, this time over the July 4 holiday. Sound of Freedom will be released by Angel Studios, a film producer and distributor that uses equity crowdfunding to finance its projects.
This past Easter, Angel released its first theatrical film, His Only Son, about Abraham struggling with God’s command to sacrifice his son. The movie cost approximately $250,000 to produce, and Angel raised $1.2 million through crowdfunding to distribute and market the project, per the Wall Street Journal. His Only Son opened third at the box office behind big releases like Dungeons & Dragons and John Wick Chapter 4.
Interestingly, Angel went a step further and utilized the Securities and Exchange Commission to release Sound of Freedom. In May, Angel filed a public investment offering to raise marketing and distribution funds. According to Angel, approximately 7,000 people invested between $10 and $25,000, which helped hit the company’s goal of $5 million in two weeks.
Sound of Freedom has already netted $10 million in presale tickets, a pretty impressive total for a release by a non-major studio. But things are more complicated once you dig into the organization that the film portrays and consider some of Caviezel’s comments on the press tour.
What is Sound of Freedom about?
This film is based on a true story, with Caviezel starring as former Homeland Security agent Tim Ballard. Dissatisfied with the work of the U.S. government in helping trafficked children, Ballard founded his own anti-trafficking group, called Operation Underground Railroad, even though that name was already taken.
Mira Sorvino plays Ballard’s wife, and actor Bill Camp portrays a man who introduces Ballard to the child slave trade in Latin America. Ballard’s mission involves undercover stings and infiltrating jungle hideouts, and contains lines of dialogue like, “God’s children are not for sale.” We really hope someone said that to the senior Vatican official who tried to bribe a child sex-abuse victim in the early ’90s to avoid soiling the name of the Catholic church, of which Caviezel is a devout member.
Now’s as good a time as any to note that Operation Underground Railroad’s work has been under scrutiny by journalists for a while now, including reports of faking evidence and fabricating results.
Yes, that’s the liberal media, blah, blah. But the organization has been credibly linked to QAnon in the past, and has recently had to “distance itself from conspiracy theory groups who have chosen to latch onto child exploitation and human trafficking as a vehicle to deceptively bolster their causes.” Still, Ballard told the New York Times that some of those fake theories “have allowed people to open their eyes.” Sure, and shoot up pizza joints in Washington, DC for no reason at all.
There’s also the matter of Caviezel himself, who on his press tour has been promoting Ballard’s organization as well as the baseless conspiracy theory that a massive network of “liberal elites” is trafficking and killing children to obtain the chemical compound adrenochrome.
Where can you watch Sound of Freedom?
If you’re still interested, Sound of Freedom will be opening in 2,600 theaters on July 4, before presumably hitting Angel’s streaming service in the coming months. You might want to get to the theater early, in case QAnon tries to reserve the best seats for its members.
