Yes, your kids may want to see Woody and Buzz and the Minions over Fourth of July weekend, but for the parents and grandparents and non-kid-havers who don’t? There is the historical epic Young Washington, which significantly overperformed expectations.
Young Washington, the Angel Studios film, made $7.6 million on its opening day, doubling Supergirl’s total, and it should make $20-21 million over the course of this weekend, where it will end up behind only the aforementioned behemoths of Minions and Monsters and Toy Story 5.
This is without much of a critical endorsement, as it has a rotten 58% on Rotten Tomatoes from reviewers, but that is a sharp contrast with its 94% audience score, indicating it’s a big hit with a wider crowd.
The film may have come out of relative nowhere, but it boasts big names like Andy Serkis, Kelsey Grammer and Ben Kingsley. It’s a breakout moment for star William Franklyn-Miller, who earned a rave review from Chris Pratt in a viral social media video where he says everyone should see the film.
All of this is very reminiscent of another, very similar situation with another Angel Studios movie, one released on July 4 of 2023. That would be Sound of Freedom, which has a 57% Rotten Tomatoes critic score and a genuinely stunning 99% audience score with over 10,000 reviews. That kind of percentage is borderline impossible to maintain with so many reviews in, and it may very well be one of the best audience-scored movies on the entire site.
Sound of Freedom starred former Jesus Christ actor Jim Caviezel in what the studio claims is based on a true story of a man rescuing children from traffickers. The film went on to make $250 million worldwide (73% domestically) on a $14.5 million budget.
Angel Studios, as the name suggests, has much of its content based, in some form, on Christian principles, calling itself “values-based” entertainment. While that could sound cheesy to outsiders, what’s clear is that there is an audience for it, both in terms of how movies like these score, and how they earn (over on streaming, Angel is also responsible for the biblical megahit, The Chosen).
We have also seen a similar story in the last few weeks with Citizen Vigilante, the Uwe Boll/Armie Hammer feature that has a 7% Rotten Tomatoes score from critics and a 94% from audiences. These are two sides of a similar coin, the Angel projects are political right-leaning with their Christian themes, but Citizen Vigilante goes way, way harder into the brutal politics and policies of the far-right with a flagrant anti-immigrant message bathed in blood. In different ways, critics write them off, but in both cases, they are more attractive than the mainstream would believe. This isn’t a talking point; it’s genuinely borne out by the numbers, both scores and earnings.
Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.