The Decibel - ‘Sound of Freedom’ becomes a controversial blockbuster hit

Episode Date: July 26, 2023

While conversations about movies are being dominated by ‘Barbie’ and ‘Openheimer’, another movie currently sitting in third place has become a surprise – and controversial – summer blockbuster.‘Sound of Freedom’ has already made US $125-million, despite being a low-budget film from an indie studio. Critics say the movie (about a former government agent’s pursuit to take down child-sex traffickers) is QAnon-adjacent and is stoking political conspiracy theories.The Globe’s Deputy Arts Editor and Film Editor, Barry Hertz is on the show to explain how this movie became a runaway hit and why it’s so controversial.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

By now, you've probably heard about the success of Barbie and Oppenheimer, also known as Barbenheimer. But there's another movie that's become a surprise hit of the summer. My country, tis of thee. Why are you doing it? Saving the liberty. Because God's children are not for sale That's a clip from Sound of Freedom It's a low-budget movie from a faith-based studio And since its release on July 4th

It's made $125 million It's currently the third biggest movie in the U.S. and Canada. But Sound of Freedom is also stirring up a lot of controversy, with critics saying it's stoking political conspiracy theories. Barry Hertz is the Globe's deputy arts editor and film editor. He's on the show to tell us how this movie became a runaway hit and why it's so controversial. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Barry, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me.

Before we get into some of the controversy around this film, can you just briefly tell us what is this movie actually about? So this movie is about Tim Ballard, who is a former Homeland Security officer who investigated sex crimes, pedophiles, online child porn. And eventually he decided after busting pedophiles in the United States that he was going to go to the source of the problem and track down the child traffickers themselves in South America. So this is about his kind of a rogue mission to hunt the bad guys directly, kind of a vigilante tale of a righteous man taking down evil child sex traffickers. Yeah. And you use that word righteous, which is there's some kind of irony here because it stars Jim Caviezel, who people probably know from Passion of the Christ.

Most righteous man in cinema. Play Jesus himself. Yes. OK, so this movie is based on a true story. The story of this real person, Tim Ballard. I guess how much of it is actually based on truth? Well, I mean, these are kind of the fuzzy gray areas that you would encounter in any movie based on a real life figure.

But there's been much consternation and accusations of embellishment and obfuscation on the part of Ballard's backstory. And we don't really know the extent of his child rescue missions and how successful they were and how careful they were and how accurate to the reality of the child trafficking landscape that they were. So there have been experts in the field who have decried the film's portrayal of that landscape and reality and criminal enforcement.

And like any film production, things can be embellished. Timelines can be compressed. Heroism can be hyperbolized. So, you know, people might be taking this a little too much as gospel, whereas it is, you know, Hollywood fictionalization. Well, OK, let's let's get into, I guess, the some details about this movie now, because, Barry, in your review, you called this movie a, quote, no frills thriller that is, quote, thoroughly mediocre, which, you know, it's not the best review. But that also doesn't scream controversial to me, right? No, I mean, listen, like if you didn't know any of the backstory

and you didn't know exactly what this movie was trying to do and what the studio behind it is known for, you would kind of just see it as another B, maybe C level kind of direct-to-video thriller

with kind of recognizable faces fighting kind of recognizable bad guys with kind of, you know, the lower end production scale of, you know, just a gritty little thriller that you'd throw on Netflix any evening and half pay attention to. It's not a technical atrocity. It's not a masterpiece. It's just right there on the lower end of the middle scale. Okay. So you mentioned the studio behind the movie. So give us on, quote unquote, wholesome content, kind of operating within the faith centric sphere of cinema, you know, specializing in mid very low to mid budget movies featuring kind of familiar faces that carry kind of a message of trying to do good in the world. Okay, but you're talking about like a religious bend here. That's not what the movie is about exactly, though. So what's the connection? Like why this studio for this kind of movie? And dissect what the right-leaning, movie-going audience in the American cinemascape right now is really interested in and what they're reading about and what they're very passionate about. internets where there are a lot of concerns about child trafficking as if it is kind of the new crime epidemic that is sweeping America. Okay. Yeah. I think you're kind of getting into the idea of Pizzagate maybe like QAnon this realm.

QAnon. I mean, QAnon at its core is started off as an online chat thread by this mysterious figure known as Q, who was making all these wild predictions about the political atmosphere in the United States and positing all these really vile conspiracy theories about liberal elites ruling the world and by doing so, harnessing their secret powers as child predators to do so. And basically, it was calling for an uprising in the United States against this, and that Donald Trump was their born and bred leader. So these interwoven conspiracy theories which posit that America and the world really is run by some elite cabal of liberals who are involved in child sex trafficking and taken to another extreme, harvesting the blood of those children to prolong their youth. These are two theories that have been very much simmering in the right wing social media sphere and have been propagated by Jim Caviezel and Tim Ballard,

the man he is playing in this film. Okay. And just to be clear, there's no evidence to support these things. No, of course, there's there's no evidence whatsoever. OK. So both the actor and the guy that the role is based on are proponents of this this kind of stuff. Yes. They are very much regular speakers on what we can call the QAnon conference circuit in the United States. I mean, it's obviously a ludicrous and noxious theory, but it has really taken hold of certain corners of the Internet. And those corners have also been very much heavily promoting sound of freedom. Donald Trump, for instance,

hosted a special screening at his New Jersey country club. Mel Gibson, who has, of course, directed Jim in Passion of the Christ and has in more recent years certainly been known to peddle some outlandish theories about, let's say, the Jewish people or the liberal elites of Hollywood, has also very much advocated for people to see this film. So there is a whole conversation pushing people, pushing audiences who might not otherwise go to the movies, who might not otherwise go to the multiplex at all to go see this movie. Okay. And so even though the film itself does not mention QAnon or anything, right? Like these aren't explicit things in the movie,

but you're saying there's connection. People are making connections here. There is adjacencies. Yeah, exactly. There are connections being made. But the movie itself, if again, if you were to put it in a hermetically sealed bubble, you wouldn't necessarily know.

So that's what makes it a little bit controversial and tricky to talk about. The words QAnon, Pizzagate, Trump, totally absent from the film itself. I want to touch on something that you kind of mentioned a bit earlier about how child welfare advocates actually see the content of this film. What are they saying about the movie's portrayal of sex, child sex trafficking? Well, I mean, they're saying that it's essentially sensationalizes it and paints it in a picture that makes it a little bit more terrifying and scary and omnipresent than it really is. The film looks at child sex trafficking exclusively from the

perspective of young children ripped from their families by complete strangers and taken to parts unknown and then sold into the machinery of underground sex trafficking. When as the unfortunate reality of sex trafficking, which is a very real thing and a very real problem all over the world, is that it mostly happens within the home. It is mostly perpetrated by parents or family members who have many problems ranging from criminal tendencies to addiction to mental health problems to desperation to poverty. All those horrible things and the innocent children get wrapped up in that and trafficked through that kind of sphere. Also, from the figures that a lot of experts in the real life world say, you know, child sex trafficking is also something of a post-pubescent problem. While there are certainly cases involving young children, we're really looking at adolescents and teens who are being trafficked heavily. So even though, I mean, it sounds like even if this portrayal is not necessarily accurate as the way that it generally happens in the real world, I mean, isn't there something to be said, though, for a movie that, I guess, brings this up as an issue and tries to tackle

it as an issue and bring people's attention to it? I mean, yeah, there is something to be said. I mean, like, listen, the very core message, if you kind of boil it down and separate every other factor surrounding the film and every other person surrounding the film, is that child sex trafficking is bad and awareness of it is good. I think you'd be very hard pressed to find anybody who disagreed with that notion. It's just the way in which it is being marketed, sold, talked about, and pushed into the discourse that is a little disturbing. We'll be back in a moment. So Sound of Freedom has made $125 million so far. Can you put that into context for us, Barry? For a movie like this, is that a lot of money for it to make?

That's a tremendous amount of money. It's a shocking amount of money. It's a bewildering amount of money, especially if you compare it to just the general performance of films in the summer movie marketplace. I mean, it's now surpassed The Flash in terms of box office. It beat Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One at this weekend's box office. This is a post-pandemic success story for independent film. No other independent film that is a film not coming from major studios like Disney or Sony or Paramount, has made this much money since 2019.

Its box office climbs steadily weekend to weekend instead of slowly dropping off, as is the traditional theatrical release pattern. That's interesting. So that sounds like that's a fairly uncommon pattern. It's a fairly uncommon pattern. It's a very uncommon pattern. So in its second weekend of release, Sound of Freedom made 37% more money than it did in its first week. That's almost unheard of. Huh.

Do we know why? Well, one reason is word of mouth, certainly. We're talking about it. Awareness is being built. People are getting curious, but there is also this very new and rather ingenious system that Angel Studios and the producers of the film have devised called a pay it forward system. So at the end of the film, Jim Caviezel pops up on screen as himself, imploring the audience to spread the word of the movie. Sound of Freedom is one of those films that can legitimately change this world. So we want to ignite a fire in audiences and open their eyes to the dark reality of millions

of children that need our help. Tell friends, tell family, make sure that people get out to see Sound of Freedom. Buy them a ticket. And then a QR code pops up on the screen. What? First time I've ever seen that in a film. So the actual filmmakers are urging the audience to take out their cell phones during a screening, which is, of course, fantastically backwards.

And when you scan that QR code, it takes you to a website that allows you to buy tickets for those who may not be able to afford them or may not just simply have the initiative to buy tickets of their own. And are, you know, maybe the gift of a ticket is that push to get them into the theater. So we're not quite sure. And Angel Studios has not broken down how much of the box office is from those big blocks of tickets that are being purchased via this pay it forward system. That's fascinating. So when we're talking about these big numbers it's doing at the box office, I mean, people

are buying tickets, but we don't really know if people are seeing the movie necessarily. Not necessarily. But we do have to say, you know, box office is reported by the theaters and then it's transmitted to the studios. So money is going somewhere. Money is going to the traditional means of who would get that revenue. All right. So headlines about this movie, including actually one that you've written, Barry, mentioned that this is this is really a surprise hit this summer. Why't headlined a movie that performed well at the box office since Passion of the Christ, which was more than two decades ago. I haven't seen

a poster for it. I haven't seen a billboard. I haven't seen any ads on my social media feeds. So it kind of came from nowhere. And it came from a studio, Angel, which has really no footprint in the North American box office, or it hasn't until this point. And it came into a very crowded marketplace. We have the new Mission Impossible, the new Indiana Jones. We have the Barbenheimer phenomenon. People have many more splashier, well-known, better marketed films to choose from. And yet they're going to this tiny little thing. Well, let's stay on this thread a little bit because I want to ask you a bit more about Angel Studios. This movie, Sound of Freedom, has a 14.5 million budget thereabouts.

And Angel Studios came in to fund the distribution part of it. So how did this small studio get the money to do that? Crowdfunding, really. So we're looking at another kind of social media phenomenon. In addition to their pay-it-forward system, they crowdfunded. And they got people to believe in this film and believe in their ability to distribute it and get it out to audiences. And do we have a sense of how many, when we're talking about crowdfunding, sometimes it can be just a few big donors, right?

Was that kind of the makeup of it or do we know? So we don't know exactly how many people contributed to this crowdfunding, but it's reportedly in the thousands. So this isn't a case of 10 very wealthy individuals putting their mites behind it, but a really organic grassroots kind of movement. So given the success of Sound of Freedom and the kind of unique marketing strategy, I guess I can say behind it, are we likely to see more movies use the marketing, the crowdfunding

techniques, the QR codes, use those tactics in the future? I'm sure somebody, several somebodies are currently deep in the vaults of the Hollywood studios trying to figure out how to replicate that exact success. When a formula comes along that delivers a kind of surprise breakthrough, there will be imitators. Whether they will be successful or not is an entirely different story. And one of the key factors in the success of this film, I believe the kind of right-wing talking points and kind of that vortex of online discussion is something that the mainstream Hollywood studios are not going to

be particularly interested in pursuing. It will stick to them a little bit more than it would to an outlier like Angel Studios. Just very lastly here, Barry, this is one movie that's got very entrenched sides. There's a lot of other movies that are igniting the kind of culture wars at the theater these days, right? Even with Barbie, there's a right-wing backlash against the feminism in that movie. There's a live action remake of Snow White coming out next year that's already been called Snow Woke. There's a backlash against that. I guess what does all of this say to you, Barry, about the current moment that the film industry is in? Right now, I think it's very hard to escape those culture wars because the Hollywood studios are so intrinsically tied to the cultural

discourse. And there have been battle lines that are being drawn. And there is one side that wants to ensure diversity and creative original storytelling from a progressive agenda. And on the other side, I would simply say there's a crowd that wants things to stay either the way they were or a way that they imagined they were but never actually were. I mean, you just have to go back to the talking point of making America great again. When was it actually great?

And why are we trying to claw back time? I guess it would be wonderful if we could get back to just looking at a film and evaluating its artistry, its storytelling, what it is trying to accomplish on its own terms. So I'm as guilty as this. Am I a little bit more skeptical or cynical about The Sound of freedom because I'm looking at it from the genesis of those who are making it and why they are making it and what they hope to accomplish with its success versus the story and storytelling within it? Probably. Probably. But I think that the agenda that it is pushing and the conversation that it is fueling is far more concerning than whatever Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie are trying to say about feminism and the patriarchy in Barbie. Barry, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today.

Thanks for having me. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wells. Our summer producer is Nagin Nia. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrienne Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you tomorrow.