What if you didn’t go to Hollywood to launch a film or TV project — but, instead, went to, oh, say, Provo, Utah? Angel Studios has a plan to help folks do just that.
Traditionally, Hollywood gets to make the rules, because Hollywood has the gold — in the form of financing, production expertise and distribution deals with TV networks, digital streamers and theaters.
That’s bad news for anyone who wants to make shows and movies that don’t fit with the interests and personal preferences of those currently running Tinseltown.
But, what if the gold could be found elsewhere? What if, rather than fighting Big Showbiz, one just drove around it?
How the success of ‘The Chosen’ can lead the way to a new entertainment model.
Take, for example, the hit series about Jesus called The Chosen. Currently working on its third season, the show is a smash with audiences all around the world.
Of course, this is all relative. The Chosen is no Game of Thrones or even Squid Game, but for a faith-based show that’s not on any major networks or streaming platforms, it’s doing really well.
It even did great business on the big screen with a Christmas episode/music special that hit theaters as a Fathom Event in December.
The engine behind it is Angel Studios, based in the unlikely entertainment mecca of Provo, also home to rising cablenet BYUtv.
“We can turn this crowdfunding thing into a way to solve the chicken and an egg problem with content and distribution.” — Angel Studios co-founder and CEO Neal Harmon.
Angel Studios is a financing and distribution company from the original creators of VidAngel, which got into all sorts of legal trouble for creating a service that took the racy bits out of Hollywood films.
After a legal settlement with Disney and Warner Bros., the VidAngel business has now been sold off and is currently a separate company.
With bankruptcy, reorganization and rebranding now behind them, co-founders Neal and Jeffrey Harmon created Angel Studios, which has a fresh focus.
Here’s how it described itself in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC):
We are not your typical media and entertainment company. We are guided by our “North Star” principle, which is to share stories with the world that amplify light. We do this by aligning our interests with those of the creators and the audience, utilizing the wisdom of crowds to help guide decisions on the content that gets created.
In times of stress and worry, our original content has already helped hundreds of millions of people laugh out loud more than a billion times and provided tens of millions with hope during a dark, and uncertain season of history. We believe there has never been a better time to build a different media and entertainment company that allows You to “Be part of stories that matter.”
It all began with some clean comedy.
Says co-founder and CEO Neal Harmon, “In 2016, when we raised money for our own company, there was a brighter spark, where we said, ‘We can turn this crowdfunding thing into a way to solve the chicken-and-the-egg problem with content and distribution,’ where you can’t make really good content without having the distribution first.
“Then we tested it out with [the clean-comedy series] Dry Bar Comedy. And when Dry Bar started producing a billion views a year, we’re just like, ‘Yes, we’re onto this. We’re competing with the big players on comedy and even exceeding their performance. And, so, can we do this again with scripted series?”
But we still wondered if we just had lightning in a bottle.” — Harmon
“That’s when we did The Chosen. It was a slog. We worked through got the thing to where it was successful, Now it’s growing. It’s a juggernaut, and it’s one of the most beloved shows about Christ in history. But we still wondered if we just had lightning in a bottle.”
For The Chosen, Angel Studios partnered with the show’s producers to set up the crowdfunding model that got the series up and running, making it the most successful crowdfunded project in history at that time.
Now, bear with me, what follows is some pretty dense business/financial/investing stuff, but it all matters — especially if you want to drop some money into the enterprise, or even try doing it yourself.
All this was made possible because of a provision in the JOBS Act of 2016, which allowed startup companies to sell ownership — a k a equity — stakes in their businesses.
This differs from previous crowdfunding models, which featured startups offering premiums or prizes for investing, but not equity.
The SEC highly regulates this kind of thing, and there are all kinds of rules and limits concerning it (more on that here).
Also, all investment carries an element of risk and loss — up to and including the loss of the entire investment — and this new model is no exception.
But it got the show off the ground.
Angel Studios has also stepped in to create The Chosen app, which, till recently, has been the show’s chief distribution outlet.
The show also airs on BYUtv, and episodes can be purchased digitally or on DVD. As series creator Dallas Jenkins announced in a Feb. 27 livestream, a native Roku app is close to being released, with AppleTV and Amazon FireStick in the offing.
“Right now everyone’s looking on this saying, ‘Oh, I wonder what’s going to happen.’ And we’re seeing it. And we see it happening in five years.” — Harmon
Speaking of lightning in a bottle, Angel Studios may have caught it again. The company broke the record it set for The Chosen by using the same investment model to raise $5M for the first season of an animated series version of The Wingfeather Saga, a four-book fantasy series written by Christian singer-songwriter Andrew Peterson.
Says Harmon, “When that was the fastest raise ever for a crowdfunded show, and we raised $5 million in 20 days, we said, ‘OK, this model is going to work, and it’s going to scale.’ Now, we see it very, very clearly. We see a picture that’s five years from now.
“Right now everyone’s looking on this saying, ‘Oh, I wonder what’s going to happen.’ And we’re seeing it. And we see it happening in five years.”
Maybe there’s a way to also bypass Hollywood’s tastemakers and gatekeepers.
Angel Studios’ concept is not just about crowdfunding the money, but also crowdsourcing development. Normally, a relatively small group of financiers and executives decides what gets produced. You might have an idea that would be a big hit with ordinary moviegoers or TV viewers, but if it doesn’t suit the suits, it dies on the vine.
So, rather than asking the execs what they want, why not ask the viewers — or in Angel Studios’ case, its “Angel Investors”?
Here’s how the company describes its process (more details here):
Says Harmon, “The success rates of content after it has gone through our jury system, and through the crowdfunding system, getting the validation from the crowd, the audience, and then the creators answering the audience as they make their life dream …
“I think we’re going to see, over and over and over again, that the results out of that system will delight and benefit society on a different level and a different scale than what we see out of the Hollywood machine.”
Going beyond the pitch or even the script in greenlighting projects.
But, don’t show up to Angel Studios with a pitch deck or even a finished script. Harmon and his colleagues want to see something more in the range of 10 to 20 minutes long.
“The majority of people who are getting through the door are Hollywood people who know the business, know the craft, and are sick and tired of the machine.” — Harmon
“We get submissions every day of, we call them torches,” he says. “They’re short films for pilot episodes that the creator has made in order to show the audience a vision for what they want to do. And we’re getting these every day. …
“We’re having to turn away 20 to 40 of these for every one that we accept. And it’s not us, too, that accepts them, it’s the audience.
“We create a randomized jury from the audience in order to select what content makes it through. We ask them two questions: how disappointed they’d be if it weren’t made, and then whether or not the story amplifies light. And that’s how people get through the door.
“But what’s interesting is that the majority of people who are getting through the door are Hollywood people who know the business, know the craft, and are sick and tired of the machine.”
“The Hollywood bubble has all of the in crowd, and what’s acceptable and what’s not, and what the trends are and what the trends should not be. And those are different than the rest of the world.” — Harmon
Now, it’s not just small investors who have discovered Angel Studios. According to a Jan. 5, 2022, press release, the company has gone beyond crowdfunding to attracting major investors, for a total of $47M.
From the release:
The financing was led by Gigafund, a venture capital firm backing the world’s most ambitious and transformative entrepreneurs, and Bain-backed Uncorrelated Ventures, which invests in infrastructure software. Gigafund is known for being one of the largest investors in SpaceX, as well as other game-changing companies in industries ranging from education and energy to healthcare and housing.
Original seed investors Alta Ventures and Kickstart Fund also participated. In addition to the venture backing, five million of the investment round was crowdsourced directly from Angel Studios fans.
Thanks for bearing with me. Now we get to the fun stuff, and it all has to do with bubbles — where they are, how to get in them, or how to get around them.
As you can see, these investors are not necessarily those who normally sink money into entertainment. Like Harmon and the others at Angel Studios, they’re outside the Hollywood bubble.
“The Hollywood bubble has all of the in-crowd,” says Harmon, “[deciding] what’s acceptable and what’s not, and what the trends are and what the trends should not be. And those are different than the rest of the world.
“Hollywood just really, really knows how to make movies. And they really have attracted all the capital. And, so, their bubble is the bubble that impacts the world.
“I suspect, if we have our bubble [here in Provo], and they have their bubble, that little societies and communities all over the world have their own bubbles.
“They have their own stories, and they want their stories to be told.”
Taking advantage of an unintended consequence of the pandemic.
One thing the pandemic did is accelerate the decentralization of work, driven by necessity and facilitated by advancements in technology.
“What we feel really needs to be broken is the Hollywood elite decisions as to what is made and what should succeed and what should fail.” — Harmon
Actual physical production has long taken place in different areas of the world, but now, perhaps the decisions about choosing, developing, financing and distributing entertainment are also shifting more out of New York and Los Angeles.
Says Harmon, “How do we get those stories out there so that all humanity can benefit from the good things that are happening throughout the world?
“What we feel really needs to be broken is the Hollywood elite decisions as to what is made and what should succeed and what should fail. If that can be moved into the hands of audiences, that’ll be a big win for media and just for the world in general.”
Angel Studios has set up an intriguing model. Maybe creators don’t have to beat or join Hollywood. In the future, the road to success might just run through places like Provo … or wherever you happen to be.
Image: Angel Studios
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