--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knutson.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And I'm Jessica Mendoza.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Today, we're talking about Christian filmmakers who have surprised Hollywood with a series of box office hits. Our colleague John Jurgensen explains how their successes could change the entertainment industry.
--:-- John Jurgensen: In the early days of Hollywood, stories about the Bible dominated the silver screen. You could look back to the time of the big studios, the heyday, golden age of the big studios, when religious epics of the Ten Commandments and Spartacus and things like that were the ultimate mainstream.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: That's right. And one of the most iconic films of that era is Spartacus. Do you remember the famous line, "I'm Spartacus"?
--:-- John Jurgensen: (laughs) Yes, I do.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: But over time, these kinds of biblical stories fell out of popularity. And in the decades that followed, many of the religious films that did get made were produced on the cheap.
--:-- John Jurgensen: Grandmothers and churches are contributing funds to these movies getting made. They're used to making things on a shoestring.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: But more recently, these Christian-oriented movies have gotten a makeover, and a new wave of filmmakers are on the rise.
--:-- John Jurgensen: What we've seen in the last few years is an influx of movies that have really surprised Hollywood with their successes, either at the box office or in other nontraditional ways.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: And these are movies that kind of seem to come out of nowhere. In a lot of cases, they are faith-based films and TV shows about the life of Jesus or about religious subjects.
--:-- John Jurgensen: One big hit in the past few years is the TV series The Chosen. Jesus is finally here! Will you come with me?
--:-- Ryan Knutson: And there was also the movie Jesus Revolution. If you feel like you're misunderstood and judged, this is where you belong.
--:-- John Jurgensen: These shows and movies have found big audiences and commercial success. And now, Hollywood is trying to get back into the game.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Studios are really struggling right now to figure out what people will show up for.
--:-- John Jurgensen: And I think people in the faith world believe they have something to offer. They believe they have something that can capture a broad swath of audience members who may have more in common than they know.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Because basically you're trying to ask, like, is this the next big thing in Hollywood?
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Welcome back to The Journal. I'm Ryan Knutson.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And I'm Jessica Mendoza.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: We're talking about Christian filmmakers who have surprised Hollywood with a series of box office hits.
--:-- John Jurgensen: The first sign that there might be a modern-day opportunity for religious movies came in 2004 with the release of Mel Gibson's epic The Passion of the Christ.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: It was a serious film about Jesus, and the dialogue was entirely in the ancient languages of Aramaic, Hebrew, and Latin.
--:-- John Jurgensen: That really sort of was a record scratch for Hollywood was The Passion of the Christ which was just you know it took the world by storm not just because it was such a big success but because it was such a visceral treatment of the story of Jesus Christ and it was a huge hit and signaled to Hollywood of course, wherever there's money, Hollywood follows, and signaled to Hollywood that there was a market there.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: But when Hollywood tried to go after this market, after The Passion of the Christ, it didn't go so well.
--:-- John Jurgensen: A lot of movies were flops, like Evan Almighty, a comedic take on the story of Noah's Ark, starring Steve Carell as an unwilling Noah and Morgan Freeman as God.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: You know, people in the faith-based content world still talk about that movie as sort of a prime example of, you know, what Hollywood does and when they get it wrong.
--:-- John Jurgensen: So you're really him, aren't you? You want more proof?
--:-- Ryan Knutson: I haven't done the Pillow of Soft thing in a while.
--:-- John Jurgensen: That's all right.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Hollywood studios had tried and failed to make some of these big movies in the wake of The Passion of the Christ. It didn't work out for them, and of course they're going to abandon that, right? That's a bad business model for them.
--:-- John Jurgensen: With Hollywood giving up on the genre again, there was a gap in the market, which eventually gave rise to a new generation of independent filmmakers.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: So one of the most important players in this world is Angel Studios. It's a studio, independent studio, based in Provo, Utah, essentially Mormon country, and they got their start by trying to scrub content from Hollywood studios and clean it up.
--:-- John Jurgensen: Essentially, their business model when they first got started, before they were called Angel Studios, was to filter movies from all kinds of big studios so, you know, families could watch them at home together so you could scrub out the sex and the violence and the curse words and things like that.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: But their business of scrubbing Hollywood movies for sex and curse words ultimately got sued by Hollywood Studios that claimed copyright infringement.
--:-- John Jurgensen: So the founders pivoted. One thing what Angel decided to do was like, hey, instead of trying to clean up what Hollywood is giving us, why don't we just create our own stuff?
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Angel Studios co-founder Jordan Harmon said that he loved the storytelling on shows like House of Cards and Game of Thrones, but he thought it had a bad impact on society.
--:-- John Jurgensen: We thought, is there a way that you can get all that incredible conflict and compelling storytelling into stories that are going to uplift society in the end?
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Starting in 2017, Angel Studios collaborated with a Christian filmmaker named Dallas Jenkins to help launch a scripted drama about the life of Jesus and his followers.
--:-- John Jurgensen: It was called The Chosen. You only need me.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: In the first season of the show, Jesus starts building his group of disciples and performing miracles.
--:-- John Jurgensen: Do you want to be healed?
--:-- Ryan Knutson: The show was free to watch on the Chosen app, and it became a massive success.
--:-- John Jurgensen: The Chosen. The Chosen. The Chosen is also a movement.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: I highly recommend you go see The Chosen because it is so good.
--:-- John Jurgensen: This is an amazing show to watch, to learn the scripture.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: For some reason, I'm just sitting here like hoping that it ends differently or like hoping there's a happy ending.
--:-- John Jurgensen: This was a TV show that became a phenomenon unto itself and has become kind of one of the biggest entertainment products of the last five years or so.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Why was The Chosen such a hit? Like, what was different about it compared to other types of sort of faith-based TV shows?
--:-- John Jurgensen: Yeah, it's a great question. The Chosen succeeded in a different way because it was made in a different way.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: And this goes back to this idea that you can learn lessons from secular content, mainstream content.
--:-- John Jurgensen: Its creator, Dallas Jenkins, really tried to apply some of the storytelling methods that he loved. Let's take the lessons of Breaking Bad or The Wire and apply it to these stories that we feel are so powerful.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: What The Chosen does is allows you to kind of live with these characters.
--:-- John Jurgensen: You know, it's a character-driven story that by its very nature, the scriptures and the gospels of the Bible are sort of like cliff notes versions of what these stories are.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: So it's essentially kind of an unpacking and a deeper dive into this world.
--:-- John Jurgensen: But what might be even more surprising than its content is how The Chosen was funded.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Many of its fans paid directly to support it.
--:-- John Jurgensen: Their pitch was, if you pay us money, you know, pay into this pot, you're keeping it free and allowing other people to watch it.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: You know, it's very much of an evangelical, spread the gospel kind of message.
--:-- John Jurgensen: They are literally funding the product itself.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: And so that is a level of engagement and motivation and complete commitment by an audience.
--:-- John Jurgensen: The Chosen collected about $11 million to help fund production of the first season.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: By season four, crowdfunding helped the show's budget hit $40 million.
--:-- John Jurgensen: Following a business dispute with Jenkins, the show's creator, Angel Studios is no longer involved in The Chosen.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: In hopes of finding the next big hit Angel Studios also relies on its fans to help make decisions about future programming They call it the Angel Guild Essentially what they have done is created a kind of focus group you know, of thousands and thousands of users and members to sort of take a look at movies and TV shows that creators propose to Angel, and they essentially vote on them and say, hey, this is worth putting out.
--:-- John Jurgensen: And so if enough of this Angel Guild, as it's called, says yes to these films and these TV shows, Angel releases them out into the world.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: The Angel model is pretty fascinating just from a business standpoint.
--:-- John Jurgensen: The crowd decides what this company's putting in out. It's a sort of crowdsourced way of dealing with content.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Angel Studios has also put out shows that are not directly tied to religion, including a clean stand-up series called Dry Bar Comedy.
--:-- John Jurgensen: I love playing hide-and-go-seek with my kids.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: I figured out it's the safest way for me to abandon them.
--:-- John Jurgensen: Just for a moment.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: And then, last year, Angel Studios released a movie called Sound of Freedom, which had nothing to do with religion on the surface.
--:-- John Jurgensen: It's a modern-day thriller about child trafficking.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: You and I have been talking about faith-based entertainment and faith films and things like that, but the reality is they're trying to be more than that,
--:-- John Jurgensen: And in fact, Angel Studios doesn't like to be called a faith-driven studio.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: And they're also trying to make stuff that doesn't necessarily fit into that category.
--:-- John Jurgensen: They're trying to reach a bigger audience.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: They're trying to broaden themselves beyond the idea of, you know, a Bible film or a film about Jesus.
--:-- John Jurgensen: With Sound of Freedom, their big hit movie, that really kind of helped explode that notion of what that studio is.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: The Sound of Freedom became one of the biggest box office hits of the year and grossed $250 million worldwide.
--:-- John Jurgensen: It was kind of a galvanizing film for the politically conservative culture for whom this topic of child trafficking was a real hot button thing and was a real important topic.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: All this success has gotten the attention, once again, from big Hollywood studios.
--:-- John Jurgensen: That's next.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Welcome back to The Journal. I'm Ryan Knutson.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And I'm Jessica Mendoza.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: We're talking about Christian filmmakers who have surprised Hollywood with a series of box office hits.
--:-- John Jurgensen: The first sign that there might be a modern-day opportunity for religious movies came in 2004 with the release of Mel Gibson's epic The Passion of the Christ.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: It was a serious film about Jesus, and the dialogue was entirely in the ancient languages of Aramaic, Hebrew, and Latin.
--:-- John Jurgensen: That really sort of was a record scratch for Hollywood was The Passion of the Christ which was just you know it took the world by storm not just because it was such a big success but because it was such a visceral treatment of the story of Jesus Christ and it was a huge hit and signaled to Hollywood of course, wherever there's money, Hollywood follows, and signaled to Hollywood that there was a market there.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: But when Hollywood tried to go after this market, after The Passion of the Christ, it didn't go so well.
--:-- John Jurgensen: A lot of movies were flops, like Evan Almighty, a comedic take on the story of Noah's Ark, starring Steve Carell as an unwilling Noah and Morgan Freeman as God.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: You know, people in the faith-based content world still talk about that movie as sort of a prime example of, you know, what Hollywood does and when they get it wrong.
--:-- John Jurgensen: So you're really him, aren't you? You want more proof?
--:-- Ryan Knutson: I haven't done the Pillow of Soft thing in a while.
--:-- John Jurgensen: That's all right.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Hollywood studios had tried and failed to make some of these big movies in the wake of The Passion of the Christ. It didn't work out for them, and of course they're going to abandon that, right? That's a bad business model for them.
--:-- John Jurgensen: With Hollywood giving up on the genre again, there was a gap in the market, which eventually gave rise to a new generation of independent filmmakers.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: So one of the most important players in this world is Angel Studios. It's a studio, independent studio, based in Provo, Utah, essentially Mormon country, and they got their start by trying to scrub content from Hollywood studios and clean it up.
--:-- John Jurgensen: Essentially, their business model when they first got started, before they were called Angel Studios, was to filter movies from all kinds of big studios so, you know, families could watch them at home together so you could scrub out the sex and the violence and the curse words and things like that.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: But their business of scrubbing Hollywood movies for sex and curse words ultimately got sued by Hollywood Studios that claimed copyright infringement.
--:-- John Jurgensen: So the founders pivoted. One thing what Angel decided to do was like, hey, instead of trying to clean up what Hollywood is giving us, why don't we just create our own stuff?
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Angel Studios co-founder Jordan Harmon said that he loved the storytelling on shows like House of Cards and Game of Thrones, but he thought it had a bad impact on society.
--:-- John Jurgensen: We thought, is there a way that you can get all that incredible conflict and compelling storytelling into stories that are going to uplift society in the end?
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Starting in 2017, Angel Studios collaborated with a Christian filmmaker named Dallas Jenkins to help launch a scripted drama about the life of Jesus and his followers.
--:-- John Jurgensen: It was called The Chosen. You only need me.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: In the first season of the show, Jesus starts building his group of disciples and performing miracles.
--:-- John Jurgensen: Do you want to be healed?
--:-- Ryan Knutson: The show was free to watch on the Chosen app, and it became a massive success.
--:-- John Jurgensen: The Chosen. The Chosen. The Chosen is also a movement.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: I highly recommend you go see The Chosen because it is so good.
--:-- John Jurgensen: This is an amazing show to watch, to learn the scripture.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: For some reason, I'm just sitting here like hoping that it ends differently or like hoping there's a happy ending.
--:-- John Jurgensen: This was a TV show that became a phenomenon unto itself and has become kind of one of the biggest entertainment products of the last five years or so.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Why was The Chosen such a hit? Like, what was different about it compared to other types of sort of faith-based TV shows?
--:-- John Jurgensen: Yeah, it's a great question. The Chosen succeeded in a different way because it was made in a different way.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: And this goes back to this idea that you can learn lessons from secular content, mainstream content.
--:-- John Jurgensen: Its creator, Dallas Jenkins, really tried to apply some of the storytelling methods that he loved. Let's take the lessons of Breaking Bad or The Wire and apply it to these stories that we feel are so powerful.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: What The Chosen does is allows you to kind of live with these characters.
--:-- John Jurgensen: You know, it's a character-driven story that by its very nature, the scriptures and the gospels of the Bible are sort of like cliff notes versions of what these stories are.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: So it's essentially kind of an unpacking and a deeper dive into this world.
--:-- John Jurgensen: But what might be even more surprising than its content is how The Chosen was funded.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Many of its fans paid directly to support it.
--:-- John Jurgensen: Their pitch was, if you pay us money, you know, pay into this pot, you're keeping it free and allowing other people to watch it.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: You know, it's very much of an evangelical, spread the gospel kind of message.
--:-- John Jurgensen: They are literally funding the product itself.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: And so that is a level of engagement and motivation and complete commitment by an audience.
--:-- John Jurgensen: The Chosen collected about $11 million to help fund production of the first season.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: By season four, crowdfunding helped the show's budget hit $40 million.
--:-- John Jurgensen: Following a business dispute with Jenkins, the show's creator, Angel Studios is no longer involved in The Chosen.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: In hopes of finding the next big hit Angel Studios also relies on its fans to help make decisions about future programming They call it the Angel Guild Essentially what they have done is created a kind of focus group you know, of thousands and thousands of users and members to sort of take a look at movies and TV shows that creators propose to Angel, and they essentially vote on them and say, hey, this is worth putting out.
--:-- John Jurgensen: And so if enough of this Angel Guild, as it's called, says yes to these films and these TV shows, Angel releases them out into the world.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: The Angel model is pretty fascinating just from a business standpoint.
--:-- John Jurgensen: The crowd decides what this company's putting in out. It's a sort of crowdsourced way of dealing with content.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Angel Studios has also put out shows that are not directly tied to religion, including a clean stand-up series called Dry Bar Comedy.
--:-- John Jurgensen: I love playing hide-and-go-seek with my kids.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: I figured out it's the safest way for me to abandon them.
--:-- John Jurgensen: Just for a moment.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: And then, last year, Angel Studios released a movie called Sound of Freedom, which had nothing to do with religion on the surface.
--:-- John Jurgensen: It's a modern-day thriller about child trafficking.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: You and I have been talking about faith-based entertainment and faith films and things like that, but the reality is they're trying to be more than that,
--:-- John Jurgensen: And in fact, Angel Studios doesn't like to be called a faith-driven studio.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: And they're also trying to make stuff that doesn't necessarily fit into that category.
--:-- John Jurgensen: They're trying to reach a bigger audience.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: They're trying to broaden themselves beyond the idea of, you know, a Bible film or a film about Jesus.
--:-- John Jurgensen: With Sound of Freedom, their big hit movie, that really kind of helped explode that notion of what that studio is.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: The Sound of Freedom became one of the biggest box office hits of the year and grossed $250 million worldwide.
--:-- John Jurgensen: It was kind of a galvanizing film for the politically conservative culture for whom this topic of child trafficking was a real hot button thing and was a real important topic.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: All this success has gotten the attention, once again, from big Hollywood studios.
--:-- John Jurgensen: That's next.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Welcome back to The Journal. I'm Ryan Knutson.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And I'm Jessica Mendoza.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: We're talking about Christian filmmakers who have surprised Hollywood with a series of box office hits.
--:-- John Jurgensen: The first sign that there might be a modern-day opportunity for religious movies came in 2004 with the release of Mel Gibson's epic The Passion of the Christ.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: It was a serious film about Jesus, and the dialogue was entirely in the ancient languages of Aramaic, Hebrew, and Latin.
--:-- John Jurgensen: That really sort of was a record scratch for Hollywood was The Passion of the Christ which was just you know it took the world by storm not just because it was such a big success but because it was such a visceral treatment of the story of Jesus Christ and it was a huge hit and signaled to Hollywood of course, wherever there's money, Hollywood follows, and signaled to Hollywood that there was a market there.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: But when Hollywood tried to go after this market, after The Passion of the Christ, it didn't go so well.
--:-- John Jurgensen: A lot of movies were flops, like Evan Almighty, a comedic take on the story of Noah's Ark, starring Steve Carell as an unwilling Noah and Morgan Freeman as God.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: You know, people in the faith-based content world still talk about that movie as sort of a prime example of, you know, what Hollywood does and when they get it wrong.
--:-- John Jurgensen: So you're really him, aren't you? You want more proof?
--:-- Ryan Knutson: I haven't done the Pillow of Soft thing in a while.
--:-- John Jurgensen: That's all right.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Hollywood studios had tried and failed to make some of these big movies in the wake of The Passion of the Christ. It didn't work out for them, and of course they're going to abandon that, right? That's a bad business model for them.
--:-- John Jurgensen: With Hollywood giving up on the genre again, there was a gap in the market, which eventually gave rise to a new generation of independent filmmakers.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: So one of the most important players in this world is Angel Studios. It's a studio, independent studio, based in Provo, Utah, essentially Mormon country, and they got their start by trying to scrub content from Hollywood studios and clean it up.
--:-- John Jurgensen: Essentially, their business model when they first got started, before they were called Angel Studios, was to filter movies from all kinds of big studios so, you know, families could watch them at home together so you could scrub out the sex and the violence and the curse words and things like that.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: But their business of scrubbing Hollywood movies for sex and curse words ultimately got sued by Hollywood Studios that claimed copyright infringement.
--:-- John Jurgensen: So the founders pivoted. One thing what Angel decided to do was like, hey, instead of trying to clean up what Hollywood is giving us, why don't we just create our own stuff?
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Angel Studios co-founder Jordan Harmon said that he loved the storytelling on shows like House of Cards and Game of Thrones, but he thought it had a bad impact on society.
--:-- John Jurgensen: We thought, is there a way that you can get all that incredible conflict and compelling storytelling into stories that are going to uplift society in the end?
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Starting in 2017, Angel Studios collaborated with a Christian filmmaker named Dallas Jenkins to help launch a scripted drama about the life of Jesus and his followers.
--:-- John Jurgensen: It was called The Chosen. You only need me.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: In the first season of the show, Jesus starts building his group of disciples and performing miracles.
--:-- John Jurgensen: Do you want to be healed?
--:-- Ryan Knutson: The show was free to watch on the Chosen app, and it became a massive success.
--:-- John Jurgensen: The Chosen. The Chosen. The Chosen is also a movement.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: I highly recommend you go see The Chosen because it is so good.
--:-- John Jurgensen: This is an amazing show to watch, to learn the scripture.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: For some reason, I'm just sitting here like hoping that it ends differently or like hoping there's a happy ending.
--:-- John Jurgensen: This was a TV show that became a phenomenon unto itself and has become kind of one of the biggest entertainment products of the last five years or so.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Why was The Chosen such a hit? Like, what was different about it compared to other types of sort of faith-based TV shows?
--:-- John Jurgensen: Yeah, it's a great question. The Chosen succeeded in a different way because it was made in a different way.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: And this goes back to this idea that you can learn lessons from secular content, mainstream content.
--:-- John Jurgensen: Its creator, Dallas Jenkins, really tried to apply some of the storytelling methods that he loved. Let's take the lessons of Breaking Bad or The Wire and apply it to these stories that we feel are so powerful.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: What The Chosen does is allows you to kind of live with these characters.
--:-- John Jurgensen: You know, it's a character-driven story that by its very nature, the scriptures and the gospels of the Bible are sort of like cliff notes versions of what these stories are.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: So it's essentially kind of an unpacking and a deeper dive into this world.
--:-- John Jurgensen: But what might be even more surprising than its content is how The Chosen was funded.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Many of its fans paid directly to support it.
--:-- John Jurgensen: Their pitch was, if you pay us money, you know, pay into this pot, you're keeping it free and allowing other people to watch it.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: You know, it's very much of an evangelical, spread the gospel kind of message.
--:-- John Jurgensen: They are literally funding the product itself.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: And so that is a level of engagement and motivation and complete commitment by an audience.
--:-- John Jurgensen: The Chosen collected about $11 million to help fund production of the first season.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: By season four, crowdfunding helped the show's budget hit $40 million.
--:-- John Jurgensen: Following a business dispute with Jenkins, the show's creator, Angel Studios is no longer involved in The Chosen.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: In hopes of finding the next big hit Angel Studios also relies on its fans to help make decisions about future programming They call it the Angel Guild Essentially what they have done is created a kind of focus group you know, of thousands and thousands of users and members to sort of take a look at movies and TV shows that creators propose to Angel, and they essentially vote on them and say, hey, this is worth putting out.
--:-- John Jurgensen: And so if enough of this Angel Guild, as it's called, says yes to these films and these TV shows, Angel releases them out into the world.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: The Angel model is pretty fascinating just from a business standpoint.
--:-- John Jurgensen: The crowd decides what this company's putting in out. It's a sort of crowdsourced way of dealing with content.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Angel Studios has also put out shows that are not directly tied to religion, including a clean stand-up series called Dry Bar Comedy.
--:-- John Jurgensen: I love playing hide-and-go-seek with my kids.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: I figured out it's the safest way for me to abandon them.
--:-- John Jurgensen: Just for a moment.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: And then, last year, Angel Studios released a movie called Sound of Freedom, which had nothing to do with religion on the surface.
--:-- John Jurgensen: It's a modern-day thriller about child trafficking.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: You and I have been talking about faith-based entertainment and faith films and things like that, but the reality is they're trying to be more than that,
--:-- John Jurgensen: And in fact, Angel Studios doesn't like to be called a faith-driven studio.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: And they're also trying to make stuff that doesn't necessarily fit into that category.
--:-- John Jurgensen: They're trying to reach a bigger audience.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: They're trying to broaden themselves beyond the idea of, you know, a Bible film or a film about Jesus.
--:-- John Jurgensen: With Sound of Freedom, their big hit movie, that really kind of helped explode that notion of what that studio is.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: The Sound of Freedom became one of the biggest box office hits of the year and grossed $250 million worldwide.
--:-- John Jurgensen: It was kind of a galvanizing film for the politically conservative culture for whom this topic of child trafficking was a real hot button thing and was a real important topic.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: All this success has gotten the attention, once again, from big Hollywood studios.
--:-- John Jurgensen: That's next.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Welcome back to The Journal. I'm Ryan Knutson.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And I'm Jessica Mendoza.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: We're talking about Christian filmmakers who have surprised Hollywood with a series of box office hits.
--:-- John Jurgensen: The first sign that there might be a modern-day opportunity for religious movies came in 2004 with the release of Mel Gibson's epic The Passion of the Christ.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: It was a serious film about Jesus, and the dialogue was entirely in the ancient languages of Aramaic, Hebrew, and Latin.
--:-- John Jurgensen: That really sort of was a record scratch for Hollywood was The Passion of the Christ which was just you know it took the world by storm not just because it was such a big success but because it was such a visceral treatment of the story of Jesus Christ and it was a huge hit and signaled to Hollywood of course, wherever there's money, Hollywood follows, and signaled to Hollywood that there was a market there.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: But when Hollywood tried to go after this market, after The Passion of the Christ, it didn't go so well.
--:-- John Jurgensen: A lot of movies were flops, like Evan Almighty, a comedic take on the story of Noah's Ark, starring Steve Carell as an unwilling Noah and Morgan Freeman as God.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: You know, people in the faith-based content world still talk about that movie as sort of a prime example of, you know, what Hollywood does and when they get it wrong.
--:-- John Jurgensen: So you're really him, aren't you? You want more proof?
--:-- Ryan Knutson: I haven't done the Pillow of Soft thing in a while.
--:-- John Jurgensen: That's all right.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Hollywood studios had tried and failed to make some of these big movies in the wake of The Passion of the Christ. It didn't work out for them, and of course they're going to abandon that, right? That's a bad business model for them.
--:-- John Jurgensen: With Hollywood giving up on the genre again, there was a gap in the market, which eventually gave rise to a new generation of independent filmmakers.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: So one of the most important players in this world is Angel Studios. It's a studio, independent studio, based in Provo, Utah, essentially Mormon country, and they got their start by trying to scrub content from Hollywood studios and clean it up.
--:-- John Jurgensen: Essentially, their business model when they first got started, before they were called Angel Studios, was to filter movies from all kinds of big studios so, you know, families could watch them at home together so you could scrub out the sex and the violence and the curse words and things like that.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: But their business of scrubbing Hollywood movies for sex and curse words ultimately got sued by Hollywood Studios that claimed copyright infringement.
--:-- John Jurgensen: So the founders pivoted. One thing what Angel decided to do was like, hey, instead of trying to clean up what Hollywood is giving us, why don't we just create our own stuff?
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Angel Studios co-founder Jordan Harmon said that he loved the storytelling on shows like House of Cards and Game of Thrones, but he thought it had a bad impact on society.
--:-- John Jurgensen: We thought, is there a way that you can get all that incredible conflict and compelling storytelling into stories that are going to uplift society in the end?
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Starting in 2017, Angel Studios collaborated with a Christian filmmaker named Dallas Jenkins to help launch a scripted drama about the life of Jesus and his followers.
--:-- John Jurgensen: It was called The Chosen. You only need me.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: In the first season of the show, Jesus starts building his group of disciples and performing miracles.
--:-- John Jurgensen: Do you want to be healed?
--:-- Ryan Knutson: The show was free to watch on the Chosen app, and it became a massive success.
--:-- John Jurgensen: The Chosen. The Chosen. The Chosen is also a movement.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: I highly recommend you go see The Chosen because it is so good.
--:-- John Jurgensen: This is an amazing show to watch, to learn the scripture.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: For some reason, I'm just sitting here like hoping that it ends differently or like hoping there's a happy ending.
--:-- John Jurgensen: This was a TV show that became a phenomenon unto itself and has become kind of one of the biggest entertainment products of the last five years or so.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Why was The Chosen such a hit? Like, what was different about it compared to other types of sort of faith-based TV shows?
--:-- John Jurgensen: Yeah, it's a great question. The Chosen succeeded in a different way because it was made in a different way.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: And this goes back to this idea that you can learn lessons from secular content, mainstream content.
--:-- John Jurgensen: Its creator, Dallas Jenkins, really tried to apply some of the storytelling methods that he loved. Let's take the lessons of Breaking Bad or The Wire and apply it to these stories that we feel are so powerful.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: What The Chosen does is allows you to kind of live with these characters.
--:-- John Jurgensen: You know, it's a character-driven story that by its very nature, the scriptures and the gospels of the Bible are sort of like cliff notes versions of what these stories are.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: So it's essentially kind of an unpacking and a deeper dive into this world.
--:-- John Jurgensen: But what might be even more surprising than its content is how The Chosen was funded.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Many of its fans paid directly to support it.
--:-- John Jurgensen: Their pitch was, if you pay us money, you know, pay into this pot, you're keeping it free and allowing other people to watch it.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: You know, it's very much of an evangelical, spread the gospel kind of message.
--:-- John Jurgensen: They are literally funding the product itself.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: And so that is a level of engagement and motivation and complete commitment by an audience.
--:-- John Jurgensen: The Chosen collected about $11 million to help fund production of the first season.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: By season four, crowdfunding helped the show's budget hit $40 million.
--:-- John Jurgensen: Following a business dispute with Jenkins, the show's creator, Angel Studios is no longer involved in The Chosen.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: In hopes of finding the next big hit Angel Studios also relies on its fans to help make decisions about future programming They call it the Angel Guild Essentially what they have done is created a kind of focus group you know, of thousands and thousands of users and members to sort of take a look at movies and TV shows that creators propose to Angel, and they essentially vote on them and say, hey, this is worth putting out.
--:-- John Jurgensen: And so if enough of this Angel Guild, as it's called, says yes to these films and these TV shows, Angel releases them out into the world.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: The Angel model is pretty fascinating just from a business standpoint.
--:-- John Jurgensen: The crowd decides what this company's putting in out. It's a sort of crowdsourced way of dealing with content.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Angel Studios has also put out shows that are not directly tied to religion, including a clean stand-up series called Dry Bar Comedy.
--:-- John Jurgensen: I love playing hide-and-go-seek with my kids.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: I figured out it's the safest way for me to abandon them.
