How to Kill A Brand: Angel Studios

Pleasing Everyone, Failing Everyone: The Angel Studios Story

Angel Studios is back with Rule Breakers, a feel-good film about a "trailblazing" all-girls science team from Afghanistan. While the premise might appeal to a niche audience of progressive evangelical wine moms, it strays far from what Angel’s core audience wants. The studio is drifting from the values and storytelling that made The Chosen and Sound of Freedom wildly successful. This is a story that conservative brands need to pay attention to because Angel Studios is following the time-honored conservative tradition of shooting themselves in the head in search of acceptance by mainstream culture.

Angel Studios has drawn sharp criticism from twitter guys, including

Office Hours with Lomez

’s pointed ridicule and

The Conundrum Cluster

’s takedown of another Angel Studios misstep, Homestead.

Here’s the trailer for Rule Breakers:

Though boomers are gushing about this Woman Hear Me Roar empowerment piece in the comments section, they will probably be too busy watching CNN to see it in theaters.

My forecast: Angel Studios is not only gearing up to add another box office loss to its growing list of failures but is also on the fast track to kill the brand equity it built with the Chosen and Sound of Freedom.

The Importance of Early Adopters and Word of Mouth

Pursuing a broad audience is often a recipe for failure in film, especially in a high-pressure, short-timeframe industry. Success hinges on network effects—the buzz that makes it feel like "everyone is talking about this movie." Films, much like tweets or TikToks, have a limited half-life. If they’re not generating conversation, excitement, or word-of-mouth momentum, they quickly fade into obscurity. A theatrical release is essentially a high-stakes, one-shot viral campaign. Word of mouth isn’t just helpful—it’s the difference between turning years of effort and millions of dollars into a triumph or a career-ending disaster.

To succeed through word of mouth, a film needs a die-hard following baked in from the start.

This is why Hollywood keeps rebooting Spider-Man—they're tapping into an established audience that already loves the character.

So, who is that core audience for Angel Studios?

The Rise

Mike and Jamie Harington have two kids, with a third on the way. They live in Dallas, Texas, where they attend Watermark, a conservative megachurch. They met on a mission trip and are your quintessential conservative family. Like many others, they’ve grown tired of Hollywood’s relentless portrayal of Christians and Christian heroes in a negative light. At the same time, they’re unimpressed with the low-quality offerings of platforms like Pureflix. Mike, for instance, watched God’s Not Dead with his youth group and vowed never to watch another Christian movie again.

Mike works as a mortgage broker, while Jamie has cultivated a substantial Instagram following by sharing tips on living as a Proverbs 31 woman and extolling the virtues of beef tallow for skincare.

There are hundreds of thousands of families just like Mike and Jamie, a deeply underserved audience left out by mainstream media.

But reaching them comes with significant challenges. Filmmaking is expensive, and conservative investors are notoriously hesitant to fund the arts. Meanwhile, the film industry itself seems adept at keeping Christians locked out, its maze of regulations and relationships impossible for an outsider to navigate.

Enter the Chosen.

The Chosen

Dallas Jenkins, a filmmaker, had a bold idea for a narrative series centered on the life of Jesus. He partnered with the Harmon brothers, founders of Angel Studios, to bring it to life. Together, they devised an innovative approach to funding and distribution: crowdfund the series, bypassing the need for traditional backers, and distribute it directly through their own app.

The result was nothing short of brilliant. Families like Mike and Jamie’s finally got the high-quality Christian storytelling they had been waiting for, and Angel Studios paved the way for future projects to follow this model.

However, Angel soon gained a reputation for playing hardball with their talent, culminating in a very polite—but very public—divorce from The Chosen this past year.

While both sides assured their audiences that the "kids" were doing fine in the new arrangement, the breakup didn’t go unnoticed. Angel Studios and The Chosen had become virtually synonymous in the minds of many fans. Letting the relationship sour to the point of requiring legal intervention was a major misstep. It was the first clear sign that not all was well in Angel Land.

Despite this, Angel’s coffers were full, and the studio was gearing up to take some big swings.

According to Jenkins, 50% of the crowdfunding donations for The Chosen went straight into Angel Studios' pockets. If true, this means that out of the $61 million raised, Angel walked away with $31 million—funds they used as seed money for an ambitious slate of theatrical releases to build their brand and recruit thousands of new subscribers to their $20-per-month “guild” membership.

Sound of Freedom

Their first feature-length theatrical release was Sound of Freedom, where the OTHER Jesus (Jim Caviezel) takes on the role of an FBI agent turned anti-sex trafficking hero. This is turbo America—a down-home softball lobbed right over the plate for Mike and Jamie. It wasn’t overtly political but perfectly aligned with their preferred causes, concerns, and beliefs.

It was a smash hit. Christians and the wider conservative audience devoured it, turning it into a grassroots phenomenon. Almost 20% of the entire revenue was driven by friends buying extra tickets for friends and family to see it. Sound of Freedom raked in a jaw-dropping $184 million at the box office, leaving the latest Indiana Jones and the Black Woman Who Could—eating dust.

Of course, the mainstream media reaction was exactly what you’d expect when conservatives dare to address protecting children. How dare some scrappy upstart tell a TRUE story about child sex trafficking? How QAnon of them!

Conservatives believed Sound of Freedom signaled the start of a new era in film. If you’re willing to take that kind of heat from the left, you’re bound to make great films—unless the heat gets too intense and you crack under the pressure.

In hindsight, the cracks were already visible. Take Neal Harmon, CEO of Angel Studios, and his comments about Sound of Freedom:

“This film is not about conspiracy theories. It’s not about politics.”

At the time, it sounded like a straightforward statement. Now, it reads like damage control—a nervous attempt to fend off the inevitable backlash.

The lesson Neal should have learned is simple: when you make authentically conservative or Christian content, you’ll not only make money but also bathe in leftist tears for the rest of your days.

But instead of doubling down, Angel Studios seemed to lose its nerve. Whether it was the backlash or internal doubts, their subsequent films took a far more conciliatory approach to mass culture. Unfortunately, this shift produced a string of nothing burgers—films that said nothing new, sparked no conversations, and achieved no daring feats except to step on literally everyone’s toes at once.

The Turning

Cabrini

Their next film was an ambitious attempt to reimagine Catholicism’s beloved St. Cabrini as a feminist girl-boss icon.

One marketer involved in the project described the process this way:

“They were so obsessed with reaching a wide audience, which to them, that meant making the film and its marketing more woke and less Catholic. I told them that wouldn’t work, but my supervisors wouldn’t listen. It was a dumpster fire.”

After watching the film, I have to agree—it was a beautifully shot, well-acted dumpster fire.

Cabrini suffers from the fatal flaw of having no real character arc. After all, you can’t have a woman grow, because growth requires flaws, and flaws apparently aren’t very empowering. Add to that the usual PC tropes: immigrants are victims of the villainous white Christian men, the Church wants to hold the woman back and won't give her a chance, guns are evil, and, of course, racism is everywhere. Did I mention white men are bad?

I’m sure both progressives AND Catholics will just love this film, won't they?

As Seth Godin, a big name in marketing, says:

“When you speak to everyone, you speak to no one."

Let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine two different “early adopter” audiences see Cabrini and discuss it with a friend afterward.

The Feminist

"Hey, fellow nonbinary New York apparatchik, what did you do last night?"

"Oh, I watched Cabrini, that new Angel Studios film. I had to review it for work."

"How was it?"

"Well, I guess these Catholics might be starting to come around. The cinematography was strong, and Cabrini was portrayed as a strong, empowered woman. But the film had the usual issue—too much sexual repression."

"Should I go see it?"

"Nah, skip it. There's a film coming out next week about a Christian mom who becomes trans and starts a successful brothel, helping gay kids escape poverty. Watch that instead."

The Catholic Mom

"Hey there, fellow mom with six kids and a tradvan; what did you do last night with the fam?"

"Oh, my husband and I went to see Cabrini."

"How was it? The trailer felt kind of feminist."

"Yeah, it was okay. The production quality was great, but I wish they’d focused more on her faith. She came off a little too 'girl boss' for me."

"Ugh, why can’t they ever get saint movies right? I’ll probably skip it."

The Result

Cabrini flopped harder than your drunk uncle at the family pool party by trying to play it down the middle. It failed to capture a die-hard audience, generated no word-of-mouth buzz, and alienated both progressives and Catholics. Instead of building a loyal base, it managed only to draw some lukewarm interest from mainstream media—and a $50 million loss.

The core problem? Cabrini abandoned the values that its intended audience cherishes—faith, fidelity, and love—and replaced them with a watered-down narrative of subtle feminist conquest. By attempting to appeal to everyone, it ended up pleasing no one. This misstep is emblematic of Angel Studios’ broader struggle: prioritizing mainstream approval over their original mission to serve the deeply underserved conservative audience that built their brand.

The Decline

Cabrini was followed by Bonhoeffer, a film about one of the most important theologians in the modern protestant mind, a man who famously conspired to assassinate Hitler himself. We could have seen a gripping exploration of nihilism’s confrontation with true Christianity. We could have seen why the sands of German national identity were shifting, how the Weimar Republic was the most decadent civilization in recent history, and how the German people fell for Nazism because it promised to return their dignity as a people. What is a theologian to do who values political action? How will Bonhoeffer’s family navigate these high-pressure moral dilemmas he’s facing?

That could have been the movie.

But no—this film isn’t about any of that. Instead, Bonhoeffer boils down one of history’s most layered figures into a one-note lecture about rAyCsm.

And did progressives appreciate this olive branch? Of course not. No matter how much you soften the edges, pandering to an audience that’s already written you off never pays dividends.

I still hold out hope that one day conservative Christians will realize that, unlike them, progressives play for keeps. No compromise will ever be enough.

So, was this movie made for Matt and Jamie? Absolutely not. Matt and Jamie are all about the civil rights movement—they tear up whenever they hear the I Have a Dream speech. But even they are exhausted by the relentless drumbeat of the same tired race narratives. Every media outlet, every Hollywood film, every university, every event, and even many churches have been force-feeding this message for decades.

The purpose of Angel Studios, at least for people like Mike and Jamie who were inspired by its early successes, isn’t just to churn out “stories of light.” Mike and Jamie are struggling. They feel the weight of a culture that seems hostile to their faith and values. They’re searching for hope, for meaning, for stories that resonate with their lives in a world that often feels like it’s turning against them. They long for stories that help them find a renewed identity in Christ as their national identity shifts beneath their feet. They need encouragement.

This film failed to deliver any of that. And so Bonhoeffer shared the same fate as Cabrini, albeit with a slightly smaller loss—$26 million. It couldn’t generate the word-of-mouth enthusiasm or the hardcore buy-in that made Sound of Freedom a phenomenon.

Homestead and the Rest

Homestead followed Cabrini and Bonhoeffer with an unconvincing post-apocalyptic prepper film. Its core message, as MysteryGrove aptly put it, boils down to: “let in all the refugees.”

How do you think that lands with Mike and Jamie in 2025, when immigration is their number one voting issue and one of Jamie’s favorite books is Boundaries?

After all, conservative aesthetics do not a conservative movie make. Ask Yellowstone, the show where the kids return the land to the Indians, who then knock over their ancestors' gravestones.

You gotta take care of your neighbor, even if you don’t have any food and they are coming to take what’s yours. It’ll all work out if you have faith. That’s just the gospel message.

Homestead broke even, but only because they kept the budget low.

Money Talks

Given my assumptions, I estimate total losses associated with Angel’s slate of theatricals since Sound of Freedom at -70M.

I’m making some educated guesses here. The only public numbers are the box office and production budgets. Let’s assume they spent 1.5x the production budget on marketing (typically 2x) and take home roughly 55% of the box office revenue, which would then be split between the production company and Angel itself. I’ve used the same ratio for international grosses as Sound of Freedom, where the international take was 0.36% of the domestic box office. Streaming revenue is usually around 15% of the box office.

My assumption is that Angel does a great job of pushing all of the losses onto the production companies, but still. When you take these films as a slate, they are not the runaway success you’d like to see from a Hollywood disruptor.

Angel’s saving grace is their guild. Their subscription-based model can weather losses like these for now. They’ve built a name and gained valuable experience. The real question is: will they learn from it? Will they return to their roots and make films that serve a desperately underserved audience? Or will they keep trying to chase the impossible?

Just Desserts

I sincerely hope Angel Studios takes this moment as an opportunity to reflect, to listen, and to learn. The release of Rule Breakers may have been conceived with good intentions, but it raises a critical question: Who is this movie truly for?

Is it for the vaguely Episcopalian wine mom? She might watch it, but it won’t spark a deep connection. It won’t be her passion.

And let’s be honest: it’s not for Muslims either.

So, who does it serve? It’s certainly not for Mike and Jamie—the loyal, faithful audience who long for stories about people like them. Stories that wrestle with the same struggles they face celebrate their values and reflect their beliefs. They want narratives that resonate with their lives, challenges, and triumphs. Is that too much to ask?

So I ask you, Angel Studios:

• Can you create films that honor our heroes as our heroes?

• Can you celebrate traditional masculinity—the kind that uplifts, protects, and provides?

• Can you lionize traditional femininity—the kind that nurtures and puts her children first?

• Can you bring back the sacred, the transcendent, and the meaningful to a culture that desperately needs it?

Because your audience is here, waiting. But they need to see that you’re listening. They need to feel that their trust, loyalty, and identity are valued—not abandoned.

For your sake and for ours, don’t lose sight of who you are and who you serve.

“You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
- Winston Churchill

I’m the founder of a marketing firm and production studio building a new Christendom. Check out what we’re up to at www.sherwoodfellows.com. We can help you identify your core audience, build brands they’ll love, and pillage the woke megacorp competition.