“Angel Studios understood that the best billboard for this film was going to be word of mouth.” - Alexandro Monteverde
Alejandro Monteverde should be thrilled, having co-written and directed the sleeper hit of the summer: Sound of Freedom. Eight years in the making, on a budget of $14.5 million, the indie film has racked up than $167 million in domestic ticket sales since its July 4th release. That box office gross puts it on par with franchise offerings like Disney’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and the latest installment of Mission: Impossible. Audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes are a near-perfect 99%.
And yet the director is frustrated. While fans might love his movie, which is based on former federal agent Tim Ballard’s controversial accounts of rescuing children from sex traffickers, critics have given it middling scores and credit much of its success to the savvy marketing tactics of Angel Studios. The faith-based distributor raised $5 million through crowd-funding to help market the book and promote awareness of the issues with a “pay it forward” ticket campaign. With right-wing fans like Steve Bannon and former President Donald Trump in their corner, the movie became a cause.
QAnon Fan Favorite
Then came the QAnon fans. It’s hard to distance your film from that crowd when star Jim Caviezel is one of its best-known proponents, having espoused a conspiracy theory that has liberal elites in Washington, Hollywood and elsewhere being part of a satanic global pedophile ring that’s torturing children to harvest the hormone “adenochrome” to stay young. (For a fuller explanation of that bizarre theory, click here.)
Ballard, for his part, has talked about a “godless leftist media” running interference for traffickers during his publicity tour. That Monteverde’s movie was initially picked up by 21st Century Fox and then shelved after the company was acquired by QAnon bete noire Disney has only added to rumors of attempted suppression.
Monteverde’s fictionalized Ballard feels like a cross between Mr. Rogers and Colonel Kurtz, a world-weary family man who risks his life (and others) to rescue an 11-year-old girl sold into serving a cartel leader. Disguised as a doctor dispensing vaccines — there’s fodder for debate! — he’s a rogue hero. (Caviezel did play Jesus in The Passion of The Christ.)
The religious overtones are muted. In fact, one of the least believable parts of the movie is hearing Ballard’s wife and mother of six kids (played by Mira Sorvino) tell her husband to quit his Homeland Security job and give up his impending pension to find a few missing kids in Colombia — which apparently is pretty close to what actually happened.
Also unbelievable is the implied scope and nature of the global child trafficking crisis. Most child abductions are motivated by custody disputes, with stranger abductions accounting for less than 1% of missing children and a fraction of trafficking cases. Children who are sexually exploited tend to be lured in by people they know, not burly men who toss them in the back of a van.
Movie Night Becomes A Rallying Cry
In a polarized political environment, though, these are the kind of messages that can turn movie night into a rallying cry.
Monteverde says it’s became too much. “I had kept my distance because I'm not a politician,” he says. He adds that he didn’t think the movie would be marketed as faith-based until he met Angel Studios CEO Neal Harmon and his brothers in an effort to secure new distribution for the film. “I was blown away by them ... and that's where this journey began.”
“Angel Studios understood that the best billboard for this film was going to be word of mouth,” he says, with the faith-based audience as its target. When the rhetoric became too much, he adds, “I became a little pain for them...we agree to disagree.”
As Sound of Freedom is set to launch internationally, I sat down with Monteverde to talk about what’s next. (Click above for the full interview)
Studio executives and others will certainly be looking for lessons from the movie’s successes and challenges ahead.
Monteverde may not love the rhetoric but it’s hard to argue with the results. As he puts it: “If I'm a distributor in France and this movie is making close to $200 million in the US, I would for sure be calling distributors to say, “Okay, what did you guys do?”
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August 12, 2023 at 06:30AM
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“Sound Of Freedom” Director Alejandro Monteverde On QAnon, Critics And Going Global - Forbes
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