‘Sound of Freedom’ distributor Angel Studios goes public, touting ‘values-driven’ movies

“Sound of Freedom” distributor Angel Studios made its stock market debut Thursday as the company looks to expand its streaming service and eventually penetrate international markets.

The Provo, Utah-based firm is trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol ANGX. Shares of the company rose 8% to $13.

Angel Studios’ launch on the public market is the latest step in the company’s unconventional journey into the entertainment business.

Founded by brothers Neal, Daniel, Jeffrey and Jordan Harmon, the company began as VidAngel, a service that allowed viewers to sanitize Hollywood movies by erasing sex, violence and swear words. But in 2016, VidAngel was sued for copyright infringement by Walt Disney Co. and Warner Bros., who said the company’s business model — which involved purchasing thousands of DVDs and Blu-ray discs and allowing users to stream them online — was essentially piracy.

VidAngel eventually settled the case, and the Harmon brothers sold off the filtering business. The company rebranded as Angel Studios and kept its content production and crowdfunding operation.

Today, the firm operates a streaming service and releases movies theatrically, including 2023’s massively popular “Sound of Freedom,” which grossed $250 million worldwide, and the animated film “The King of Kings,” which came out in May and tells the story of Jesus. The studio focuses on what it calls “values-based storytelling,” and its slate is determined through the vote of its 1.5 million Angel Guild members, who also get free movie tickets and other perks.

“It’s really a combination of the values of a broader audience,” said Jordan Harmon, president. “If you look at movies like ‘The Sound of Music,’ or ‘Casablanca’ or ‘12 Angry Men,’ all those were broad, incredible stories that touched the lives of tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people. Those are the type of stories that we think fall right into this values-driven, light-amplifying mission.”

Though considered small for Hollywood, Angel Studios moved to become a publicly traded company because its nearly 70,000 investors required it to, said company Chief Executive Neal Harmon. The company merged with a special purpose acquisition company (or SPAC) called Southport Acquisition Corp. to go public. A SPAC is essentially a shell company that exists solely to buy a private company and take it public without the scrutiny of a traditional IPO.

“We’re turning the way that this industry works on its head,” he said. “And because we are not doing the traditional Hollywood gatekeeper thing, we also needed to access capital in an untraditional way.”

The path is far from the potato farm in Idaho where the brothers grew up, and where the nearest neighbor was a quarter-mile away. Working together on the farm — and sharing a bedroom for years — helped foster the communication and bond between the brothers, said Jeff Harmon, chief content officer.

“If you look in Hollywood, the best partnerships have all been brothers,” he said, ticking off several successful movie business sibling partnerships including the Disneys, Warners and Nolans. “When they actually work together really well, it becomes unstoppable.”