OPINION
In a previous article, I challenged you to do something about woke Hollywood. It seems that one film could show conservatives that complain about the film industry how to beat Hollywood.
In the article I mentioned a film called Sound Of Freedom produced by Jim Caviezel. With the tagline ‘God’s children are not for sale’ the film tells the story of former CIA agent Tim Ballard, who founded Operation Underground Railroad, an anti sex-trafficking organisation. While Ballard would go around the world to do this work, the movie follows him, played by Caviezel, travelling to rebel-held territory in Colombia to rescue a kidnapped girl.
The film itself is absorbing and the development and production is particularly interesting. The film took eight years to make and five years to screen. According to director Alejandro Monteverde, major streaming and screening companies like Netflix and Amazon refused to stream it because it was ‘not for them’.
Finally, Angel Studios, a Utah-based company, agreed to screen the film and with a limited screening, the film was finally released.
Nobody expected that it would become a cultural phenomenon. It made $18.2 million in its opening weekend placing third in the box office and beat out the latest Indiana Jones film despite receiving less publicity. It made $45.7 million in total placing it as the 25th highest grossing film for 2023, again despite less advertising than the other blockbusters.
The panic in Hollywood is palpable. The left wing mainstream media appear to be so afraid of this film that they accuse it of spreading ‘QAnon conspiracy theories and misinformation’. They have attacked the accuracy of Tim Ballard, accusing his work at Operation Underground Railroad of being exaggerated.
Despite the organisation being around since 2013, it is only now that the media has begun to ‘scrutinise’ its work. Disruptions seem to be occurring at theatres showing the film: the air conditioning is being shut off, lights are being left on and fire alarms have been set off during screenings. People watching the film are reporting having their tickets refunded. It is almost as if somebody is trying to sabotage the screenings.
Could this signal another step in the collapse of Hollywood? I’m sure I’m not the only one to notice that the major film studios seem to be reduced to making remakes of the classics. Is Hollywood running out of ideas and money?
While Hollywood might blame the current position on lockdowns shutting down movie theatres and the rise of streaming platforms, could the reality be that Hollywood movies are just really bad? Instead of telling good stories, have they followed Bud Light and fallen into the trap of preaching woke messaging to their audience, turning them off in droves? Before you ask, this happened long before the current writers’ strike.
This may well be why we are seeing the rise of a new film industry, bolstered by conservatives along with non-political workers fleeing Hollywood, looking for independence.
The Daily Wire has already released a number of films including Terror on the Prairie, starring Gina Carano, and the controversial documentary What Is a Woman? They have invested $100 million in kids’ content with three kids shows already in development under DW Kids, a branch of their film company. Recently they also announced the development of two scripted TV shows that will adapt Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and Stephen R Lawhead’s Pendragon Cycle series.
Christian films are also going through changes. In frustration at the boring Christian films coming from Pure Flix, a new streaming platform called LOOR has been launched by two Christian filmmakers (https://www.loor.tv/). LOOR offers content unfiltered by Hollywood and ‘church ladies’. Producers don’t decide the content that the audience watches; the audience decides what they can watch. The system offered by LOOR gives viewers and subscribers the opportunity to directly fund the content they want to see being made. This side of the film industry is on the rise: it was reported that Daily Wire’s audience has increased since the launch of Daily Wire Plus. LOOR has also reported an increase in subscribers with some of their content nearly fully funded.
I recommend watching Sound of Freedom. It exposes a problem that needs to be talked about openly. Those who are guilty of child sex trafficking at any level deserve only to be exposed and dealt with by the law.
The first step may well be through exposure to a film like this, and neither the mainstream media nor the political elite nor the Hollywood elite should have the power to decide what you can or can’t watch.