Sound of Freedom is one of the biggest movies in America, thanks to Jim Caviezel, human trafficking conspiracies and clever ticket crowdfunding.
While Barbie and Oppenheimer are the obvious breakout hits of the summer, a dark-horse movie called Sound of Freedom has proven to be its biggest box office surprise. The small movie from indie studio Angel Studios has grossed over $125 million in just three weeks, passing Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One for the third spot at the box office this past weekend. While the faith-based movie industry has had its hits, no one saw these kind of numbers coming. But the film’s popularity is at least somewhat explainable, in retrospect.
Directed by Alejandro Gómez Monteverde (Bella), Sound of Freedom stars The Passion of the Christ’s Jim Caviezel as a fictionalized version of the very real person, Tim Ballard, a former agent for the US Department of Homeland Security. In the film, Ballard quits his job to rescue a kidnapped girl in South America, but ends up saving more than 100 victims of human trafficking. These events are inspired at least in part by stories of Ballard — though their complete accuracy is hard to verify.
Sound of Freedom’s resounding success can be chalked up to a combination of the usual (being a movie that people seemingly very much enjoy, social media word of mouth) and the unusual. Here’s how a bit of creative crowdfunding and a QAnon conspiracy theory factor in.Who is seeing Sound of Freedom?
Sound of Freedom caters to an audience that’s often underserved at the movie theater — i.e., people who just want a straightforward thriller about an American being a hero and saving the day from an unambiguous evil. While there are plenty of movies interested in people fighting bad guys, Sound of Freedom keeps things significantly more grounded than most of the other movies in this summer blockbuster season, like Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One or Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny or any number of superhero movies.
