How SOUND OF FREEDOM Inspired More Faith-Based Content
By Movieguide® Contributor
SOUND OF FREEDOM is inspiring studios to invest in a new generation of faith-based content as audience demand continues to grow.
Producer Jon Erwin, known for Teddy Bear Award® winners JESUS REVOLUTION and I CAN ONLY IMAGINE, offered some advice to Angel Studios for SOUND OF FREEDOM, another Teddy Bear Award® winner. After its massive box-office success, he joked, “It wasn’t supposed to work this much!”
“As SOUND OF FREEDOM inspired box-office think pieces and conspiracy-theory controversy, Erwin and partner Kelly Merryman Hoogstraten were in talks with Amazon Studios. Today, their company The Wonder Project is producing a slate of faith-based series and films; Erwin said he’d ‘be lying’ if he believed SOUND OF FREEDOM didn’t help him get a better deal,” IndieWire wrote.
“I had not felt that hunger from the studios in a long time to reach the audience,” he said. “It’s an audience that doesn’t even want to feel agreed with. It’s a massive audience that just wants to feel seen, heard, and understood.”
Movieguide® reported on The Wonder Project:
JESUS REVOLUTION director Jon Erwin has launched The WONDER Project, a studio committed to creating content that serves “faith and values” focused audiences…
“The dream of The WONDER Project is to create a trusted brand that serves the faith and values audience globally with movies and TV shows they didn’t know were possible,” Erwin said. “We will achieve this by giving the creatives dedicated to this audience (including myself) a level of freedom and resources they’ve never had before. This level of talent combined with the power of the stories we are developing is really inspiring! I can’t wait for the audience to experience the things we are working on.”
Other studios are also adding original faith-based content to their libraries. Last month, Netflix released a series on Moses, which became one of the streamer’s top shows.
Movieguide®’s review of TESTAMENT: THE STORY OF MOSES reads:
The dramatic re-enactments in TESTAMENT: THE STORY OF MOSES are well produced. However, the commentaries slow down the miniseries. They also contain some extra-biblical perspectives, including some feminism, determinism and slight misrepresentations about God is. So, MOVIEGUIDE® advises caution for younger children, although TESTAMENT: THE STORY OF MOSES is generally an interesting, ambitious, watchable miniseries.
Producer Martin Scorsese is creating a series about Christian saints for Fox Nation.
“The series will premiere in two parts, with the first four episodes to air on Sunday, November 16, and the final set to air in May 2025. Each episode focuses on a singular Saint, including Joan of Arc, Francis of Assisi, John the Baptist, Thomas Becket, Mary Magdalene, Moses the Black, Sebastian, and Maximillian Kolbe, examining these figures and their acts of kindness, selflessness, and sacrifice,” Deadline reported.
“The growth [in faith-based content] that has happened the last 25 years, you have studios popping up around town and you have producers, directors, and writers passionate about writing stories for this middle-American audience,” said Kevin Downes, co-founder of Kingdom Story Co. “Faith-based or not, the fact that there is that fire and hunger from beginning to end, from content creators to distributors, you’re going to continue to see it grow. The audience is there. The audience isn’t going anywhere.”
Erwin believes the uptick in faith-based films was the pandemic. It caused people to “ask the big questions” and to search for something outside of themselves.
“To really take the next step or the next leap with this type of content is just to change the way we think about it,” Erwin said. “Thinking in a broader sense is the answer.”
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