Angel Studios is crowdsourcing a "values-based" alternative to Hollywood

0:10Welcome to another episode of the Mixed Signals podcast from us here at Semaphore Media, where we are talking to all the most important and interesting people shaping our new media age. I'm Max Tani. I'm the media editor here at Semaphore. And with me, as always, is our editor-in-chief, Ben Smith. Ben, how many streaming services do you subscribe to, would you say? It got to be like a half dozen. Half dozen? What do we got? List them off. Netflix. Netflix, Amazon, Apple, YouTube TV, Mac, Hulu. Peacock? Peacock. Okay. Oh, gosh. That's a pretty good amount. What about Angel Studios? Are you a subscriber to their Guild program?

0:50Are you a member? I recently joined, funnily enough. Did you really? Did you really? Well, that's good timing. And And something that our guests on this week's episode, I'm sure, will appreciate, that's because we've got the founders of Angel Studios, Neil and Jeff Harmon, their brothers, on the show this week to talk about their very interesting kind of anti-Hollywood studio, which has seen a lot of success over the last several years. Angel Studios is a values and faith-based kind of crowdsourced new-aged digital movie studio, most famous for making the hit film, surprise hit film, Sound of Freedom, several years ago.

1:32They also have a host of new movies coming out. They've got this animated animal farm with Seth Rogen. They've got a new Ronald Reagan movie with Jeff Daniels. They've got an action comedy coming out with Owen Wilson. Yet they have this really interesting and unique model, and Ben has been obsessed with them for a minute. Why did you think that they would be good guests for a show and what are you going to ask them about? Two things. You know, they're both building a really different model for a studio, kind of trying to crowdsource the green light process and find a way to take niche faith-based filmmaking mainstream.

2:07And then also I think they have a good barometer of just American culture. Like where are things headed? Is this becoming a more religious, more traditional country? Is it becoming a more secular, more kind of trashier one? I think they're really swimming in those waters and trying to make a business out of it. Well, we want to ask them about how it all works. We want to ask them about the growth of faith and values-based filmmaking. We want to ask them about independent filmmaking and fragmentation, how that's changing Hollywood and what people are watching. But we have to take a short break, so we'll be right back with Neil and Jeff Harmon after this.

3:08We'll see you next time. and specific strategies they're using to navigate this new era. These are notes from the marketing frontier. You can find Frontier CMO on any podcast platform or watch it on YouTube.

3:25Neil and Jeff, thank you guys so much for being here. Just before kind of we get started, can you explain a little bit what Angel is to people who don't know? Oh, I'm glad you asked that question. So Angel is a response to Hollywood getting out of touch with mainstream audiences, at least from our perspective. So we as founders with young children, we were seeing the stories coming out of Hollywood and they weren't speaking to our values. And so we set out to solve that problem ourselves by asking the audience what they wanted and then giving them what they wanted. And the method by which we did this is we built a community and a technology where we have now over 2 million people who are members of the Angel Guild, who have the ability to vote on every film, every episode that comes to Angel prior to its release.

4:19And the filmmaker needs to achieve a score of at least 70 to be considered being on Angel. As a result of us having this community of people, we're taking care of the audience. They're happy with what we're providing. And we have the highest Rotten Tomatoes audience score in the world. And we're not that worried about what was being made in Hollywood. We were more worried about what wasn't being made and having a voice and a say in what happened in the future and giving a voice to our audience. against the angel guild. You said Hollywood was getting, had gotten out of touch essentially. Did you feel like there was a time when Hollywood was more in touch with the kind of values that you were talking about?

5:08When we were growing up, we grew up in Idaho. We worked on farms. We only had three TV stations. Wait, how old are you? I'm 48, but Idaho is kind of like 10, 20 years behind the rest of the world. I mean, we love you, Idaho. I wish I could move back there. I think Idaho probably still only has three TV stations. But we worked really hard. And our escape would be watching a movie or going out and acting out things were in movies. Jeffrey and I both built tree houses after Swiss Family Robinson. And we make-believed that we were on planet Hoth when the snow drifts would come. Yeah, Idaho looks a little bit like planet Hoth during the winter.

5:51Yeah. So you go out and play. And I mean, you could count the number of movies we watched, at least for me, on my fingers in theaters. And there were always dollar show movies. Back then, you send out the reel of film. It starts in the nice theaters and then it wears out. And as the picture quality degrades, then they send it over to the dollar theaters and you watch the degraded film. With sticky floor. Yeah. But it still was magical. It was so transporting to go and experience like Aladdin, the Cave of Wonders or Lion King and Mufasa saying, remember who you are. Like those kinds of things definitely tapped into our values.

6:37It's when we started having young kids and raising them in a different generation. When we saw like the really popular shows when we were thinking about this were like House of Cards, Game of Thrones. Very nihilistic. Yeah. Yeah, no. Like really well-told stories, but we said, man, if storytelling is like upstream from culture, if our culture is going to look this way in 20 years, we're not super excited about that prospect. This isn't the kind of thing that we want for our children in terms of society that's that nihilistic. So we want something with more hope, but still excellent, like well-made, but with some of these values that make society a better place.

7:20so in fact the guild members make a pledge when they when they vote they say i pledge to choose excellent stories that are true honest noble just authentic lovely or admirable those are the values that unite the angel guild community around what we're doing christian is not one of them christian yeah no that's not that's not i mean we do faith content better than anybody we're people of faith And Angel does a better job of distributing faith-based content than any studio out there. But that's a subset. That's a natural subset of the values audience that's underserved. There's a much larger values-based audience.

8:01So you'll see within that pledge, you'll see stuff coming to theaters. Like you see Runner with Owen Wilson and Alan Ritson. And you've got Tommy Lee Jones in The Angel and the Bad Man and Neil McDonough and Zachary Levi. And you have – Is it War Epic that's coming out? There's Kevin James of Rom-Com. Rom-Com with Kevin James. This year, if you look at the 10 movies going to theaters this year, only one of them is biblical. I wanted to ask about sort of a couple of the releases that are coming up because it is – as you say, it's a broad slate with a lot of big names. Can you just like talk us through – like I just sort of glanced at the Solomio materials.

8:41It kind of looks like to me like a totally classic romantic comedy featuring Kevin James. Ed Sheeran is in there. At a glance, it doesn't say this came from one studio or the other particularly. Like what makes that more, as you say, more values based than any other romantic comedy being released this year? In that specific case, we loved it. We're friends with Kevin. He did an excellent job. The elements that you're going to see is it has a lot less profanity in it. Nobody notices this. Nobody even thinks about this. It's good enough. The films on Angel or the standup comedians, like we have a whole show called Dry Bar Comedy that has 750 comedians.

9:20And we say the tagline is funny for everyone because people don't realize that it doesn't have profanity because they're just funny comedians. and so the profanity levels are dialed down significantly in solo mio so so there's these elements you're not really noticing like you said and you're going to see this throughout all of angel films you don't really notice what's different that much and there are a lot of films being released by hollywood like if you look at godzilla minus one when i watched that movie i was like oh that could have been an angel movie not not necessarily what people might think would be an angel movie.

9:57But when you know the guild and you know what the values of this audience are, you can't pin it on a genre. But yeah, you're going to see a little less profanity. You're not going to see nudity in angel movies. You're not going to have sex on screen. There's a lot of elements. You're going to see more family-driven values integrated into it because that's what the guild votes for. And interestingly, so the guild score for Solomio was 93. And then the Rotten Tomatoes audience score has hovered between 95 and 96, which is either the number one romantic comedy of all time at 96, or it's tied for it at 95.

10:34I mean, to the best of my knowledge. Yeah, I think it's the number one highest audience score on Rotten Tomatoes for a rom-com of all time. And that's because the show is made in a way that just speaks to those fundamental values that make society a better place. And it's really well done. It's really well done. Like the the cinematography in it. And when we watched it in the theater, people started clapping mid-movie. So it's a really fun theatrical experience and people leave just feeling uplifted. How does the audience score work in terms of like movies that you guys are thinking about essentially buying?

11:12Does the audience has a say in some of the movies that you guys are buying after they've already been made? Yeah, every single movie. We actually can't take a movie into Angel if the Guild vetoes it. There's been some movies I wish would have made it through. like what that just didn't make it probably shouldn't no i don't i don't think we're actually like the contract we do with them we don't can you give us like a generic sense of like what was your favorite movie they vetoed not not specifically but like you know with plausible deniability here there was a really fun shark movie that didn't make it it's like it will end up in theaters at some point but the i watched it and i was like i really like this movie but it just wasn't there wasn't there there was a really great musical that the team was rooting for as well that didn't make it through.

11:55So it happens. What did the shark do? Let's talk about the shift. So the shift is another movie that didn't pass the guild that we wanted to. And the filmmaker actually went and took it, recut it, found the parts that were confusing, clarified them, and just honed and honed and submitted it 10 times to 10 different samples of the guild before he got a high enough score to be released on Angel. And that is pretty exciting because his Guild score more than doubled over that process. And the movie now is kind of a cult classic. Let's flip the question here. Is there anything that the Guild has approved?

12:37You know, crowdsourcing, big part of what you guys are doing. Is there anything that the Guild has approved that you've been like, oh man, that's, I don't know about that one. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, which ones? Okay. You're going to get us into trouble. Just like asking us which are our favorite children. Which are your favorite children? The difficulty here is the guild, when you have 2 million people and you can sample them, the truth is in that group. And the question, so I'm the chief content officer, so my job is just to figure out how to pull the truth out. And so we're always trying to figure out how do we make sure that we're not getting like false positives or false negatives.

13:22And so I think that we're 80, 85 percent of the way there on accuracy. But it's a little bit like self-driving cars where you're trying to figure out – like you're in your Tesla and it's driving itself. And then suddenly it just like does something stupid like goes into the middle lane or whatever. If you know what I'm talking about. Like most of the time it's really, really good. But every once in a while. And the Guild, because of our ability to pull the data properly, every once in a while, I tell people, I say, if you get on Angel and you just take movies and watch them, the vast, vast majority of the time, like super majority of the time, you're going to like what you see.

14:02And then there's the majority of the time you're going to love what you see. And then there's a small percentage of the time that you're just not going to like it because it's not your cup of tea. And so I came, I was, this was just a couple months ago. There was a movie that passed the Guild and it launched onto Angel Streaming. And I was watching it and I was like, oh, this is like Hallmark-y. It's just not my kind of movie, but it was very Hallmark. And I was like, maybe we need to change the way that we do the scores. And I get home and my wife is watching the movie and she's like, I love this movie.

14:40so I was like oh that's the reason why I'm not making the decisions it's funny that you mentioned Hallmark because I think that like listening to you describe Angel and if you sort of superficially read about Angel you think oh okay like this is what in broadcast Hallmark was but like you hate Hallmark tell me the difference I don't well we don't shy away from heavy stories I mean you guys watched Sound of Freedom last night that movie is never going to show up on the Hallmark channel I would imagine. Honestly, I actually think— But that's scored in the 90s on the Guild. I thought in some ways that that wouldn't be a movie that Hollywood would do because, I mean, when you see some of the, you know, the little kid in the room with the, you know, the child abusers, it's very disturbing stuff.

15:24And in a way, actually, I think some studios you would imagine wouldn't do it because they would be like, this is so incredibly disturbing. You know, you might insinuate something, but, you know, you wouldn't put it on screen with the guy closing the windows and you kind of know what's going on in there. I don't know. I found that to be actually more disturbing than anything that I've seen from a while in a traditional Hollywood film. Yeah. And yeah, it scored a 90. 99 % on Rotten Tomatoes. Yeah. It is. All right. What are you guys doing with Rotten Tomatoes? What has happened with Rotten Tomatoes?

15:53Are you like sicking your guild on them? No. No, listen, listen. I'll follow up with this. So Sound of Freedom is the single highest rated audience score blockbuster in the history of Hollywood on Rotten Tomatoes. And we didn't have a guild back then. I mean, we had it, it was called the jury at the time, but we didn't have it the way it is now. It wasn't big. It was like 10 ,000 people or something. It wasn't productized. Yeah. It wasn't productized. It wasn't a big, big thing yet. But if you look at what happens is almost all of our guild. So when you're a member of the guild, you get two movie tickets to every movie.

16:29So every guild member that's in the premium section, they get two free movie tickets to every movie and they can redeem them through our site on Angel. They can actually redeem them using our TV apps. If you're just on the Angel app and you're a guild member, you can select your seats, check out and get your movie tickets right on your phone. Or on your TV. Or on your TV. And so these are not going through Fandango, which means our guild members, when they vote on Rotten Tomatoes, it doesn't even count. So we actually get a disadvantage on Rotten Tomatoes because of all of our core group, they're buying tickets through the angel system.

17:06But we use Rotten Tomatoes because it's a good proxy. It's the most accurate. Based on our data, it's the most accurate. It's more accurate than IMDb. IMDb doesn't, like Rotten Tomatoes at least verifies that somebody purchased a ticket and They watched the movie on Fandango. So our love group doesn't end up being part of that group. But it's very accurate data for the general audience versus IMDB where you can get haters who just come in and they rating bomb your film and it doesn't actually reflect the real audience. How much does it cost to be a part of the guild? $20 a month to be a premium guild member and then$12 a month to be a basic guild member.

17:47And how many people do you guys have in the premium versus the basic? So we haven't made that number public, but our premium group is our largest group of the guild, but our total membership is 2.2 million guild members and growing. We were at 550 ,000 guild members at the end of 2024, and then we passed 2 million at the end of the year. Was there a single event that led to that? Sound of Freedom came out in 2024? Sound of Freedom wasn't a big driver of guild memberships. The good news is that guild memberships are coming from lots of titles. We have a few that have really stood out, but the memberships are coming from all over the place.

18:32So from new titles that we've released, from some back library titles, Homestead was a big driver of guild memberships. David was a big driver of guild memberships. but they're coming from dozens and dozens of titles. To talk a little more about the films that are coming to theaters now, curious how you think about distributing a film that you didn't produce. I'm thinking of Animal Farm here that like to me feels like out on the kind of edge of what somebody might think of a values film, partly because Orwell was an atheist and there's a bunch of creators in there who I think specifically are not from that world.

19:06Actors, Ben. They're actors. Oh God, actors, actors. We still call them actors. Spending too much time with the media folks. But we got Seth Rogen, Steve Buscemi, Laverne Cox. And I actually saw a story on churchleaders.com complaining that you had a trans actor and a gay actor in this thing. How do you think about that? We have a policy for all filmmakers. So normally when you go into Hollywood, they look at your resume. They look at your background. And every decision they make about your film is based on, you know, what have you made before? What are you a part of? when the guild members vote, they don't have any of that.

19:44So they get to watch the movie without knowing who the voice actors are. For example, on King of Kings, the movie King of Kings, which came out at Easter a year ago, it had Mark Hamill. He was one of the voice actors, one of the greatest voice actors of all time. And there were a lot of Republican guild members that when it passed and we launched the trailers and they realized who was behind, who was acting in it were very upset that we would take a movie with Mark Hamill when he's been so opposed to their viewpoints politically. And Mark Hamill's handled like a champ. I mean, he actually got on and promoted the film and just ignored them.

20:30But we definitely get people every once in a while who get upset at some voice actor who took a small part in the film but what the guild's voting on is not the resume, not the person behind the screen. They're voting on the story. And that's how we pick movies. In fact, we pull credits off when they go into the guild. So, you know, we haven't ever had a Steven Spielberg submission, but if there was one, we would just remove his name. Yeah, because otherwise it would buy us. Yeah. Wow. We'd show the film exactly as it is and then people would take it for what it is. And with animation, that's even more distinct because you don't ever get to see the faces of who are actually performing behind the animators.

21:17That may be like a more radical difference in your production model than the faith stuff is in a way. Like I think so much of film product right now are vehicles for stars. And like every film begins with an agent packaging the right director and the right star to the right project. And maybe even like the project is like the third element of that. And I think they do that because they think it sells tickets, right? Like everything is a star vehicle. There's good statistics on star power and different models. But our model is the audience first. It's the guild. The guild gets to veto. So Animal Farm, to your point, it did score a 74 in the guild, which is close to the – it passed the threshold but not like in the 90s.

22:02and and so we would expect assuming it holds true with all the rest of the films that we would expect a 70s to 80 between 70 and 80 score on rotten tomatoes with audiences but we'll see how it works because there's a pretty big mob around like you think the orthodoxy around the bible is pretty strong and people get mad when you don't do it the way they want we found out the animal farm is even more orthodox. Orwell fans must be more annoying than religious Christians, I'm sure. Yeah. So I don't know if they're annoying. We're fine. I mean, our head of theatrical, Brandon Purdy, he always says, yeah, Brandon Purdy, when Sound of Freedom hit, and it's just this huge firestorm of press, humongous firestorm.

22:53And he just said, Jeff, I'd rather be hated than ignored. So let's embrace this and just keep going. Well, we have a lot more that we want to get to with Neil and Jeff at Angel Studios, but we have to take a short break, so we'll be right back after this.

23:31has changed. Are you seeing that too, Josh? I think we are, Ben. They say content is king and everything seems to be content today. That's what we're seeing inside of Google Marketing. We sponsor events like Coachella and we sponsor events like the Australian Open. And even for the launch of our Pixel hardware event last year, we had millions and millions of people tune in to watch our live event with Jimmy Fallon as we launched that phone. What we have today is means of distribution. There's There's something authentic and real and off the cuff about these events in the same way that you and I record these things and we have all the mistakes that we make.

24:06People seem to prefer that and seem to like that. And brands that get that, that they're not as polished, that is not as corporate, actually seem to do better in terms of marketing communications. So these events we're seeing all over the place can be atomized, they can be made longer, they can be made shorter, and actually distributed across YouTube to really great effect. So I think events are going to play an even more central part on all our marketing strategies for the next years to come. And where can people learn more about what marketers are doing or can do with events? So I actually want to encourage everyone to watch one of our events from Google.

24:38Google Marketing Live, you can sign up at googlemarketinglive.com or watch on YouTube, is where we will announce all the latest developments in our ad products, ad solutions, AI transformation to help marketers grow their audiences and put on their own events if need be. Check out googlemarketinglive.com.

25:22are, you know, humble potato farmers. At this point, you've worked with a lot of projects. I mean, even just Animal Farm has the names of a lot of very, very recognizable individuals. Do you find that you guys are starting to know more people, like really get to know more people? And is that changing the business? I mean, it feels like you guys kind of launched this against Hollywood in some ways. But as you mentioned, when I look at a lot of these names, you know, these are folks who are in a lot of pretty mainstream Hollywood productions. And a lot of the films, you know, are essentially indistinguishable.

25:54Yeah, they're distinguishable to the guild. But we are finding friendships with a lot of talent and a lot of craftsmen in Hollywood. And we're learning that as long as the way they see it is they say, look, we may not agree on everything, but we both agree on excellent art. Like we love art and we want the best films. And what I found, at least in Hollywood and Alejandro Monteverde, the director of Sound of Freedom, he's coming out with Zero AD this Christmas. Beautiful film. But Alejandro said, and you look at the cast on Zero AD, just huge cast. And Alejandro just said, filmmakers by and large are indifferent.

26:44They're actually not super political. They're tribally political, but they're not political. They're not necessarily tribal, even in a religious sense. But they want to make great content. They want to make great art. And if you are a great craftsman, then they want to be a part of it. And if it's pushing nihilism, that's fine as long as it's great art. And if it's pushing a faith concept, as long as it's an incredibly well-made movie, they're okay with that. And that's what we're seeing in our relationships is that there's a mutual respect for the desire to be excellent, even if we don't necessarily – even within our own company and within the own guild.