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.

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.

Here’s the trailer for Rule Breakers:

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.

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.

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

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. 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.

Sound of Freedom

Their first feature-length theatrical release was Sound of Freedom, where Jim Caviezel takes on the role of an FBI agent turned anti-sex trafficking hero. 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. Sound of Freedom raked in a jaw-dropping $184 million at the box office.

The Turning

Cabrini

Their next film was an ambitious attempt to reimagine Catholicism's beloved St. Cabrini as a feminist girl-boss icon. As Seth Godin says: "When you speak to everyone, you speak to no one."

Cabrini flopped 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. The result: a $50 million loss.

The Decline

Cabrini was followed by Bonhoeffer — a film that could have been a gripping exploration of nihilism's confrontation with true Christianity. Instead it boiled one of history's most layered figures into a one-note lecture. Bonhoeffer shared the same fate as Cabrini, with a $26 million loss.

Homestead followed with an unconvincing post-apocalyptic prepper film whose core message boils down to "let in all the refugees" — landing poorly with an audience for whom immigration is the number one voting issue. Homestead broke even only because they kept the budget low.

Money Talks

Total estimated losses associated with Angel's slate of theatricals since Sound of Freedom: -$70M.

Angel's saving grace is their guild subscription model, which can weather losses like these for now. The real question is: will they learn from it?

Just Desserts

Who is Rule Breakers truly for? It's certainly not for Mike and Jamie — the loyal, faithful audience who long for stories about people like them.

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?

Your audience is here, waiting. But they need to see that you're listening.

"You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life." — Winston Churchill

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