Inside the Faith-Based Production Company Churning Out Huge Hits

• Angel Studios built a devoted audience through crowdfunding and memberships, turning faith and family content into mainstream hits like The Chosen and Sound of Freedom.
• Its community-driven Pay It Forward and Guild model funded marketing, created enthusiastic ticket buyers, and enabled modest-budget films to achieve outsized box-office success.
• As it expands into historical dramas and mainstream genres, Angel faces legal, investor and identity risks while testing whether values-driven entertainment scales.

You may not recognize the name Angel Studios, but you probably know at least one of its hits.

The independent entertainment company helped launch The Chosen,the wildly popular series about the life of Jesus, and was behind Sound of Freedom, the surprise 2023 blockbuster that seemingly came out of nowhere.

Angel has quietly become a growing force in Hollywood by tapping into an audience that major studios have struggled to serve: viewers hungry for faith- and family-focused entertainment.

Now it’s trying to prove that formula can work well beyond religious stories — and, in the process, give the traditional Hollywood playbook a run for its money.

What is Angel Studios?

Angel Studios bills itself as “a new kind of streaming platform.” The company started as VidAngel, founded in 2013 by brothers Neal, Daniel, Jeffrey, and Jordan Harmon and their cousin Benton Crane. The service let families filter profanity, violence, and sexual content from mainstream movies and TV shows before rebranding as Angel Studios in 2021.

In 2016, the company began moving into original content. Its first major breakthrough came through The Chosen, the crowdfunded series about the life of Jesus created by filmmaker Dallas Jenkins. The company helped develop and market the equity-crowdfunding campaign that financed the first season and later distributed the show. Produced by The Chosen, LLC, now known as 5&2 Studios, the series started as a faith-based streaming experiment and became a global hit. Its first season raised more than $10 million from over 16,000 investors, who received an ownership stake rather than simply donating money. The show later expanded to mainstream platforms including Netflix, The CW, and Amazon Prime Video.

Then cameSound of Freedom, a 2023 thriller about a former federal agent’s mission to rescue children from sex traffickers. Angel acquired the independently produced thriller after Disney shelved its release following its acquisition of 21st Century Fox. Made for roughly $14 million, the film became one of 2023’s biggest box office surprises, earning more than $180 million in the U.S. and Canada and nearly $250 million worldwide. It even briefly overtook blockbusters likeIndiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny at the domestic box office — despite lacking anything close to a traditional studio-sized marketing budget.

Angel has continued to turn relatively modestly budgeted projects into theatrical successes. The animated biblical film The King of Kings, for instance, opened to nearly $20 million in 2025, which Angel says is the “top domestic opening for a faith-based animated movie.” 

According to the company, Angel is powered by ordinary viewers who pay for memberships — rather than entertainment industry insiders. Members screen prospective projects and vote on which movies and shows Angel should distribute.

That model gives audiences a stake in projects long before they reach screens — and gives Angel something major studios spend millions trying to build: an enthusiastic group of potential moviegoers already invested in a project’s success. 

Ryan Burge, a political scientist who studies religion in America, says the community-driven model also makes it easier for Angel to turn a profit without producing traditional Hollywood blockbusters. “There’s a lane in America for a $5 million film,” he says, describing Angel’s approach as “smaller bets and bigger returns.”

Now Angel is betting on a broader audience

That loyal base began with religious and family-oriented viewers, but Angel has increasingly tried to broaden its reach. 

Sound of Freedom offered an early test: While the film became especially popular among conservative and Christian audiences, it wasn’t a religious story, and its nearly $250 million global haul demonstrated that an Angel release could reach far beyond the typical box-office footprint of a faith-based movie. Angel’s slate now includes historical dramas such as Young Washington and The Brink of War, a Cold War thriller starring Jeff Daniels, Jared Harris, and J.K. Simmons, as well as projects further from the company’s roots, including romantic comedies and thrillers.

This is an even bigger bet that viewers are responding not only to religious content, but to Angel’s broader promise of entertainment built around shared values — and to having a say in what gets made. So far, The Brink of War offers mixed results. The film has earned generally positive reviews, with a 73 percent critics score and an 86 percent verified audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, but its box-office performance has been relatively modest, earning about $4.7 million domestically so far.

Angel Studios went public in 2025, and its audience continues to expand. The company now has more than 2.85 million paying Guild members, and its 10-film 2026 theatrical slate is its largest yet. Angel says only one of those releases is faith-based, underscoring its push into a wider range of genres. That suggests Angel’s next phase isn’t simply about becoming a bigger player in Christian entertainment. It’s about seeing whether its audience-driven model can compete for a much broader slice of the mainstream.

From the margins to the mainstream

Long before Angel Studios, biblical epics were among Hollywood’s biggest hits. Paramount’s The Ten Commandmentsbecame one of the highest-grossing films of its era in 1956 — and if you grew up as I did, there’s a good chance it played in the background every Easter. Three years later, MGM’s Ben-Hurwon a then-record 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

But as Hollywood evolved, biblical epics largely faded from the fray. The occasional film, like 2004’s The Passion of the Christ, broke through, but most Christian movies remained modest productions marketed primarily through churches.

It’s hard not to clock the casts Angel is able to compile of late. Recent religious Angel projects have attracted actors including Kenneth Branagh, Uma Thurman, Owen Wilson, and Mark Hamill.

While prepping to interview the author of the book The Brink of War is based on, I noticed the adaptation’s stars long before I caught the studio’s name. Then I watchedthe movieand didn’t notice anything overtly Christian about it. The Cold War thriller instead centers on the moral and political stakes of nuclear conflict and the power of negotiation, with heavy-hitters Daniels as Ronald Reagan and Harris as Mikhail Gorbachev. It’s values-laden, for sure, but I wouldn’t necessarily describe it as “faith-based.”

“The film is meant to inspire us to talk to one another, just as these two real-life characters did,” Brink of War‘s writer-director Michael Russell Gunn told me in a separate interview. “Angel has this mantra that they repeat, which is ‘amplify the light,’ and I think they took the film’s message to heart.”

Guild members will likely see more stories that reflect wholesome values without necessarily invoking religion.

Angel’s success also speaks to a larger trend in entertainment: Audiences are increasingly clustering around content that reflects their particular interests and principles. Burge says that model may be good business, but it could also accelerate the decline of the shared cultural experiences that once brought very different Americans into the same conversation.

“If we’re not watching the same movies, we’re not listening to the same music, we’re not looking at the same art, we have no commonplace to find connection with people who are different than us,” he says.

Do people want to watch this kind of content?

As Angel expands into new genres, the company faces the challenge of growing beyond its core audience without losing the identity that helped make it successful.

It has also weathered legal battles. Its predecessor, VidAngel, was hit with a $62.4 million copyright judgment after a jury found it had willfully infringed studio copyrights; the dispute was later settled. More recently, an arbitrator sided with the company behindThe Chosenin a contract dispute that ended Angel’s distribution relationship with the series in 2024.

Angel’s model comes with its own risks. The company has grown rapidly, but its public filings show that expansion has not yet translated into sustained profitability. In the second quarter of 2026, Angel reported $111.7 million in revenue — including $90.7 million from the Guild — but still posted an $18.5 million operating loss and a $23.8 million net loss, according to the company’s quarterly earnings report.

Still, media analyst Evan Shapiro says Angel recognized “one of the most underserved markets out there” and capitalized on a broader shift in entertainment.

He argues Hollywood spent years chasing the same demographics while neglecting millions of viewers looking for faith- and family-oriented entertainment. Gunn sees that demand reflected in the growing appetite for stories that blend history with an uplifting message.

Angel Studios has also rewritten the playbook for how those stories reach audiences. Alongside traditional marketing, the company has built a loyal community through crowdfunding, word-of-mouth marketing, and its “Pay It Forward” ticket program, which lets supporters buy tickets for others. The scale of that strategy became clear with Sound of Freedom: Supporters contributed roughly $26 million through Pay It Forward, funding more than 1.7 million tickets for other moviegoers, according to the company. That approach has offered an alternative to the traditional Hollywood marketing model, relying on community engagement rather than expensive promotional campaigns.

Angel’s rise reflects a changing media landscape, in which studios are increasingly finding success by serving deeply engaged communities rather than trying to appeal to everyone. As Shapiro puts it: “Fandom is substantially more powerful than reach.”