On Wednesday, Angel Studios announced a plan to take the company public by merging with Southport Acquisition Corp in a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) deal worth $1.6 billion. After the deal is completed, shares in the studio will be traded under the ticker AGSD, with co-founder Neal Harmon continuing as its CEO. This is the latest step in the meteoric rise of the independent film and television studio, known for creating movies and series focused on faith-based themes.
Angel’s first big success came in 2017 with the series “The Chosen,” depicting the life of Jesus Christ. A unique aspect of its production was that fans offered up the amazing sum of $30 million directly to create the programs through a crowd-funding campaign organized by the studio. Angel leveraged the fan following of “The Chosen” into a theatrical release for episodes of the series and crowd-funding for future projects.
In early 2023, Angel released their feature film HIS ONLY SON, which was a solid beginning for the studio by earning $13.5M at the box office on a movie that cost only $250K to produce. This was followed only a few months later by SOUND OF FREEDOM, which became one of the ten highest-grossing films of 2023 by earning over $250M in worldwide ticket sales on a crowd-funded budget of $14M. Its stunning and unexpected success raised the profile of the studio dramatically.
Angel leveraged SOUND OF FREEDOM’s positive audience response by organizing a unique “pay it forward” campaign for ticket sales, encouraging a moviegoer to pay extra when seeing the film to purchase a ticket in advance for a future customer. In effect, this made it free for new audiences to watch the film. These anonymous future ticket sales amounted to roughly 9% of all tickets sold.
While Angel has not been able to match the success of SOUND OF FREEDOM, it has continued since then as a steady source of new films to exhibitors, with faith-based titles CABRINI, SIGHT, and SOUND OF HOPE: THE STORY OF POSSUM TROT. The company continues to receive support from its loyal followers, with an average audience score of 95% on Rotten Tomatoes. After the studio becomes a publicly traded company, fans can vote their support by buying its shares.