Critics will be buzzing about Barbie and Oppenheimer for a while. But don’t let the Hollywood hullaballoo distract you from the history being made by another movie that came out this month: Angel Studios’ Sound of Freedom.
It’s not exactly a feel-good, popcorn-and-slushie movie. The heart-wrenching story is based on true events in the life of Homeland Security special agent Tim Ballard, played by Jim Caviezel. Sound of Freedom brings to light the horrific reality of child sex trafficking in the United States.
With a Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score of 100% and 8.1 out of 10 on IMDb, Sound of Freedom’s success is hard to hide. Deep State religious tracts like The Boston Globe had to go out of their way to ignore the film that shook-up box-office expectations in their official guide to the summer movie season.
The entire budget for Sound of Freedom (SOF) was $14.5 million—much of it “equitably crowdfunded.” (You’d think the libs would be into that. Apparently not.) Angel Studios will see quite the return on investment, as Sound of Freedom has been averaging $5.05 million a day in box-office receipts so far.
It takes a quick Google search to see that SOF annihilated top contender and household name Indiana Jones on its Independence Day release date. SOF also did something no movie has ever done before, a feat Hollywood certainly doesn’t want you to know.
“There have only been 10 wide-release movies in box-office history that have had a second-weekend increase greater than 35% over their opening weekend,” Bradon Purdie, head of theatrical distribution for Angel Studios, noted in a press release. “All of them achieved this milestone during Christmas. Angel Studios is the only studio to accomplish this feat during the summer blockbuster season with Sound of Freedom.”
In its second week, the film’s revenue increased 37%!
It isn’t merely that Hollywood operatives and border-crisis deniers are desperately trying to stifle the success of Jim Caviezel and Angel Studios. They’re actively deterring moviegoers from entering the theater to see SOF.
The most negative “review” of the film came from Miles Klee at Rolling Stone, who called it a “vigilante fever dream.”
“The QAnon-tinged thriller about child-trafficking is designed to appeal to the conscience of a conspiracy-addled boomer,” he claimed.
“It’s a stomach-turning experience,” he continued, “fetishizing the torture of its child victims and lingering over lush preludes to their sexual abuse.” Klee’s scathing accusations prompted me to conduct a little experiment.
I would take the Rolling Stone piece at face value and see if it held any validity. Spoiler alert: it didn’t.
I went to a 9:15 Tuesday night showing at the downtown Boston AMC, expecting to be virtually the only person in the theater—joined, maybe, members of the “white-haired” ilk Rolling Stone described as the only people showing up at the nation’s multiplexes.
Recall, this is Boston, up there for the most liberal, border-crisis-denying cities in America.
The theater was about 90% full. The predominant demographic at the weeknight showing was my generation—Gen Z. Some entire families made the trip together. I couldn’t help but notice that most of the audience was Hispanic.
In addition to its positive reception with QAnon, the idea that the movie was “highly fictionalized” is a common thread among dying Deep State organs like Slate and Vanity Fair.
Yes, some parts of the movie were altered or embellished. But SOF director Alejandro Gómez Monteverde astutely included actual footage from Ballard’s career at the end of the film.
For example, the audience gets to see video from Ballard’s island raid that saved 123 people. The audience gets to see the face of the beauty queen who lured children to the island. She wasn’t a fictional character. She was real.
Yes, the movie was “stomach-turning,” as Klee notes. Some scenes evoked tears, even whimpers from viewers near me.
But Klee totally rejects the idea that SOF could be beneficial to a society that is oblivious to the fact present-day slavery has reached global numbers never seen before. In his hit piece, Democrat propagandist Klee claims that inattention to a “climate crisis” is more detrimental than “far-right…sordid fantasies about godless monsters hurting children.”
Is this guy serious?
Even if any of the Left’s lies about the danger to minors were true—that ICE exaggerates the numbers of children smuggled over the U.S. southern border or that pedophile porn isn’t increasingly rampant— shouldn’t any child sex slavery be opposed?
The film depicts the lifelessness in the eyes of evil, active pedophiles. It shows the trauma inflicted upon minors stolen from their parents and traded like livestock day in and day out for years of what should have been their childhood.
But what Sound of Freedom does not do is perpetuate perversion or trigger traumatic experience through explicit verbal or visual exchange. For that, Monteverde has earned my respect.
What’s Miles Klee of Rolling Stone’s second-biggest fear regarding SOF’s success? That audiences will “come away thinking themselves better informed on a hidden civilizational crisis.”
His number-one fear? That audiences “will want to spread the word.”
I’ve got bad news for Miles Klee and his ilk. Sound of Freedom has already surpassed $100 million in box office receipts.