How the hell did Sound Of Freedom make $100 million?
The Jim Caviezel-starring thriller is an improbable, and controversial, bona fide hit for Angel Studios

It’s not every day that a $15 million movie, released by an independent producer, and paid for at least in part through crowdfunding, can climb to the top of the box office charts. And yet, that’s exactly the fate that’s greeted Angel Studios’ Sound Of Freedom, which has just passed the $100 million mark after just three weeks in theaters, making it the most successful independent film of 2023 by a country mile.

How did this particular movie pull it off—landing at No. 16 on the year’s domestic box office totals, just a few million behind Warner Bros.’ far-more-expensive The Flash? It’s a complicated question, one that touches on the film’s unorthodox funding methods, its faith-based marketing, and its blend of traditional filmmaking with messaging that relentlessly tells its fans that the mere act of paying to see it is a virtuous and valorous act. (This is, after all, a film that ends with star Jim Caviezel popping up, Thanos-style, for an after-credits scene, imploring audiences to “make Sound Of Freedom the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of 21st-century slavery.”)

Here, then, is a quick look at a highly unconventional blockbuster, one that’s proven as controversial as it has been lucrative over its last month in theaters.

What is Sound Of Freedom about?

Firstly: Sound Of Freedom stars Jim Caviezel as a fictionalized version of Tim Ballard, a former ICE agent who went solo to found Operation Underground Railroad, an anti-human-trafficking organization, in the early 2010s. (Vice, which has reported heavily on OUR, reported last week that Ballard has quietly “stepped away” from the group, which has faced accusations of exaggerating at least some of its accomplishments, which include claiming to have rescued “thousands” of children from human trafficking operations.) Ballard reportedly hand-picked Caviezel to play him in the movie, despite the two looking nothing alike, thanks to his appreciation for 2002's The Count Of Monte Cristo.

Directed and co-written by Alejandro Monteverde, the film was actually shot way back in 2018 and sold to a subsidiary of 20th Century Fox for release. But the company’s acquisition by Disney scuttled plans to get the movie out, and the film’s producer, Eduardo Verástegui—an actor, musician, Trump crony, anti-abortion activist, etc.—eventually bought the movie back to try to release it independently. Several years later, Angel Studios, a streaming service and film studio that rose from the ashes of the “we’ll censor your DVDs for you” business VidAngel, picked up the movie, and the rest is shockingly successful history.

As for the film itself, critics have described it as a pretty standard “principled man goes rogue” procedural, as Caviezel’s Ballard, burnt out after years of catching online pedophiles, cuts ties with the government so that he can rescue a kidnapped girl from Columbian revolutionaries. Variety’s Owen Gleiberman described it as a “solid thriller,” emphasizing that the film’s base appeal works even without the huge amounts of baggage that have been attached to it by its supporters and star. (More on the latter in a second.) It is, in other words, and by all accounts, a functional movie—not some kind of bizarre Dinesh D’Souza screed.

Why is Sound Of Freedom controversial?

Last week, AMC Theaters CEO Adam Aron and Angel Studios exec Brandon Purdie were forced to issue a joint statement to the movies’ fans, asking them to please stop accusing the theater chain of trying to keep them from giving it money for Sound Of Freedom. AMC was fielding a variety of rumors, including accusations of canceling showings, sabotaging sound systems, and even screwing with the A/C in its theaters, in order to make viewing the movie an uncomfortable experience, as part of a narrative that someone was trying to “stop” people from seeing the film.

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