The Media Odyssey

TMO - Angel Studios v2
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Evan Shapiro: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the Media Odyssey podcast. That is Marion Ranchet.

Marion Ranchet: and that is Evan Shapiro.

Evan Shapiro: and we have an amazing episode here for you on the Media Odyssey Podcast. We have one of the hottest, if not the hottest independent film label in America, if not the world with US Angel, formerly Angel Studios, now Angel, and they have an amazing record of distribution over the last number of years that is kind of unparalleled.

How much have you heard about Angel on your side of the Atlantic, Marion?

Marion Ranchet: So I have to say not much. Actually not the company itself, but their titles. And so I, a couple of years ago with the Sound of Freedom was the first time that we heard from them on my side of the ocean, so to say.

Evan Shapiro: Yeah. And so I think everyone's gonna start hearing a lot more of them in the very near future for many different reasons. But most notably from my perspective, this is the future of independent film. I don't see anybody else out there, [00:01:00] even the great A24, understanding audience dynamics and community involvement the way that Angel is.

So let's get to it.

So I was on stage at StreamTV in Denver this summer, and I was talking about how the creator economy is changing entertainment, and I used Angel Studios as an example. And then I moved right on. It was one slide I made maybe 90 seconds. And then at the end Joe from Angel came up to me and said, thank you so much for talking about us on stage.

And that's how Angel came to be on our podcast the very day the company is going public. So without further ado, let's bring the three founders of [00:02:00] Angel to the stage with us. Gentlemen, welcome.

Jordan Harmon: Thank you for having us.

Neal Harmon: Yes, thank you.

Evan Shapiro: If you wouldn't mind, just for the audience's sake, can you each introduce yourself and what your role is at Angel?

Jeff Harmon: I'm Jeff Harmon. I'm a co-founder, one of the brothers, and I'm also the Chief Content Officer for Angel.

Neal Harmon: Neel Harmon, co-founder and CEO of Angel.

Jordan Harmon: I'm Jordan Harmon, co-founder and president, and the younger side of the brothers. Number eight of nine.

Evan Shapiro: Number eight of nine?

Jordan Harmon: Yes. Lot siblings.

Jeff Harmon: Siblings.

Jordan Harmon: There's not all brothers. There's three girls, six boys. But yeah.

Evan Shapiro: Wow. That's a, it's almost a football team.

It's a great size for a basketball team, actually.

Marion Ranchet: I agree.

Jordan Harmon: Yes.

Evan Shapiro: Welcome so much. If you wouldn't mind, and whomever wants to jump in at ever any point, can you just give us a brief introduction to the founding origin story of Angel?

Neal Harmon: Yeah, you bet. I'll do that. So, we [00:03:00] as brothers have lots of experience in marketing and tech in the early parts of our careers.

And then as our careers progressed, we started raising families. And when my oldest was nine, I wanted to teach him the principle of honesty. And wanted to use the movie Cinderella Man. Just a beautiful movie with Russell Crow. And there's a moment in that movie where he asks his son to return a stolen salami to the butcher shop and he gets down on one knee in New York and looks at his son and says, "Son, we don't steal."

And then later in the movie, he has to humble himself to get government assistance. And then he returns the funds to the government office and shocks everybody.

So these, this provided the conversation starter for my 9-year-old and my little girls to talk about the principle of integrity.

And at that time we were in the media business and we were looking at the current landscape of media and not

Evan Shapiro: What was the business you [00:04:00] were in, if you don't mind me really quickly asking?

Neal Harmon: We were in, we did an ad agency that did the, some of the most viral ad campaigns in history, Poo-Pourri, Squatty Potty, Purple Mattress.

We did the Orabrush tongue cleaner, first company to make money on YouTube. Jeffrey came up with a skip add button with the Google engineers together. So we were involved in tech and marketing at the time.

Evan Shapiro: And crucially in customer acquisition was something that you were very

Neal Harmon: Correct.

Evan Shapiro: Probably I would say best in class at, right?

Neal Harmon: Correct. And I was building out a funnel and data to be able to track the customers and we got really good at getting people to buy something and based on fun infomercial branded marketing. And so we said, how do we use this skillset to go and help create something better for storytelling for our children?

And that's what Angel grew out of, was that desire over a decade ago. And [00:05:00] where it's become, we're excited to talk to you about how we, as a company are not only doing, help, helping facilitate independent filmmaking and and just an incredible release strategy, but we also are making sure that the stories that we do make society a better place.

That's what Angel's about.

Marion Ranchet: You could have started this business like anyone else in the production and distribution business, meaning that you could have gone out, building a pool of of talent and then, just producing programs that you liked and that you were green lighting.

You decided to go completely differently. How come? When did you have the idea to do that?

Jeff Harmon: We're farm boys, we're potato farmers from Idaho, so we wouldn't have known how we're supposed to do it.

Marion Ranchet: That's interesting.

Jeff Harmon: I'm not sure we still know how we're supposed to do it.

Evan Shapiro: So you didn't have anything to unlearn.

Evan Shapiro: I think that's great actually. Yeah.

Jeff Harmon: So we're sitting there trying to figure out how do we make [00:06:00] films and TV series for our families if we're gonna solve this. The problem, there's so much nihilism, so much darkness inside of the entertainment world. And there's a really good book called The User Method by Jeff Schwarting.

I think that this describes what happened in it. He goes through and explains that out of all of the really big unicorns, the vast majority of them were started by founders who just wanted to solve a problem for themselves.

Steve Wozniak from Apple just wanted to create a computer he liked, and it turned out to be the best computer at the time. And the founders of Airbnb had air mattresses on their floor to try to pay their rent. Sure. And that turned into the largest hotel basically in the world now. And so as you go through the founders of these companies, they're just solving a problem for themselves. And it turns out to be a problem that to tons of other people want solved.

Marion Ranchet: Yeah.

Jeff Harmon: And so as we take that concept and say, this is [00:07:00] what we wanna see, this is what our families wanna see, it turns out there's hundreds of millions of other people that wanna see what we wanted to see. And we, and so approaching it, we approached it the only way we knew how, which was: we don't have money. We don't have, because it costs billions of dollars to launch a studio usually, and or hundreds of millions at the very least.

Evan Shapiro: Sure.

Jeff Harmon: And we had in the single digit millions to 10 million world to be able to get this thing off the ground. And the only reason why we even had that was because we were able to crowdfund the business.

And so we're building a studio based off necessity.

Marion Ranchet: Yeah.

Jeff Harmon: And every single innovation is tied to some wall that we couldn't get over. And so we had to figure out a way to go around that obstacle. And crowdfunding was one of those. There's the, just I, we could tie back every innovation in Angel to some [00:08:00] terrible moment or obstacle that we had to overcome

Evan Shapiro: Because the problem you were looking to solve was you were looking for films that you could comfortably watch with your family without worrying that an F-bomb or a heroin addict would appear suddenly on screen.

Jeff Harmon: That's right. That's right. Or yeah. And when we did it, we did a research study with NRG and they called it the Values Audience. They said, what you guys are trying, what you want to make is targeted the at the Values Audience, which includes, there's a subset of faith in that world that's completely ignored.

And, but values in general is what we're the audience that Angel Studios is targeting, which is a very broad, large audience.

Jordan Harmon: It's the largest audience.

Jeff Harmon: Yeah.

Jordan Harmon: Based off of all the survey data we can find, is that pretty consistently you're talking about when you look at the entire globe, the vast majority of the globe feels a connection to the values audience of just principles of truth, honesty, the, these core principles that kind of govern the world.

And and we call [00:09:00] that amplifying light. Like our mission is to tell stories that amplify light and that key component is the North star that is, and it is the guiding star of how both we view it and how our audience views it as well.

Evan Shapiro: So you have this very specific genre that you're looking at that is values-based.

I think a lot of people think of you as faith-based, but in truth, when you look at your slate, there are tons of films there that are simply good, fun stories that the whole family can watch. Some have faith in them, some don't.

But crucially to go back to to Jeff's point there, you had an unusual way of raising money and there's the guild aspect of it, of how your audience is involved in the production. I wanna get to that in a second.

But the fundraising model, the investing model of individuals themselves in the slate, it's, can you explain that? 'cause it is the origin story again from how your, how you raised money and then how you used that [00:10:00] community who participated in fundraising to build out the audience and the community that now basically is the backbone of the operation.

Can you just, I don't know who wants to jump in here, but explain how that fundraising model worked and why it worked.

Neal Harmon: So in 2015, there was a law, a new laws passed, it's called The Jobs Act, signed into law by Obama. And it allowed regular people who are not credited investors to invest in a startup.

And we started studying this law in early 2016, and I think we were the ninth company to experiment with the law. And we raised $10 million in five days for our company.

Evan Shapiro: Yeah.

Neal Harmon: And to get started with Dry Bar and with other projects. We also raised money for TV shows through this law.

It's, it was, and it was a fantastic way for us to validate that the market actually wanted something 'cause they were willing to fund it to make sure that it was, that it could come.

Evan Shapiro: And these are individual humans. How many people participated in this? [00:11:00]

Neal Harmon: So we've had now over about, around 70,000 people who have invested in Angel itself.

And then we have over a hundred thousand of people who have invested in projects that Angel has distributed.

Evan Shapiro: And do many people repeat invest or is it how, what's your recidivism rate of your investors?

Neal Harmon: We have a small group of people who have invested in everything. Like we have tracked that number.

I don't have the percentages right in front of me, but, and then there are people who invest in a couple. The most common and most exciting recent investments we've done, and there's just thousands in every single film, where rather than doing a P&A budget that gets funded by a bank or by a studio, we actually go to our audience and say, Hey, you can help us launch sketch. You can help us launch the King of Kings. You can help us launch The Last Rodeo.

And right now we have The Senior that's coming to market this month and you can help.

And then we have thousands of people who cut checks of a few hundred dollars [00:12:00] and then they're talking about at their dinner table.

Jeff Harmon: Or 50 bucks.

Neal Harmon: Or 50.

Jeff Harmon: Yeah. There was a really funny story little, so we raised money for Sound of Freedom with P&A and the, so there's two sides to this 'cause you could get in a little bit of hot water when you put the investors up. So, the, but this tells you how significant what we're doing is.

So Sound of Freedom came under lots of scrutiny and there was an investor that invested like $50 that we'd never met before.

And suddenly, he got arrested and he and somebody figured out, some journalist, figured out that this investor who'd invested nothing, released a publication that said producer of Sound of Freedom, arrested.

Neal Harmon: Financier.

Jeff Harmon: Financier of Sound of Freedom arrested.

Evan Shapiro: Well, $50 is relative.

Jordan Harmon: He was acquitted later.

Jeff Harmon: He was acquitted. It actually ended up being a bogus arrest. But the, but it was headlines worldwide.

Evan Shapiro: When you ask everybody who [00:13:00] invest, you get everybody.

Jeff Harmon: But it was headlines worldwide to the point I was in London at the airport going through security and had an Angel shirt on, and the guy's like "Angel," the security guy, and he's I love your show. I haven't seen it yet, I already ordered tickets. He'd already decided he loved what we were doing.

And then he says, and he is like "you're not the producer are you?" And I was like, "No, we're the distributor." He's like "Good, because I heard the producers got arrested."

Evan Shapiro: But it shows you the chain reaction and the buzz. And frankly, the kind of tightness of your community is once somebody's in, boy, they are absolutely in.

But Neil, you were about to go into the fact that you've actually seen a huge uptick in investment in just the last, what, 30, 60 days, right?

Neal Harmon: That's right. On Saturday we reached $55 million in commitments. It was an 18 day run, and that's the statutory limit for us. 70, 75, we had raised 20 earlier. And 75 is the statutory limit under the Jobs Act.

And we reached it in 18 days, 40 [00:14:00] something thousand people invested. And Angel only had 31,000 investors before that. And then we brought in another 40,000 here right before.

Evan Shapiro: Just to put that in perspective, I think the largest Kickstarter raise ever was somewhere around eight or $10 million. So this is $55 million, and it sounds like you could probably have raised a lot more if you weren't limited to that.

Jordan Harmon: It was going very, very strong.

We knew we had to, we were planning to close it on that Saturday. And so Neal and I had penciled in a live stream to jump on and just kinda

Jeff Harmon: Push it over the edge.

Jordan Harmon: You know, push, just talk to the people and answer questions and see where people are at. And help answer any questions around the investment.

But we were expecting to close out the round and maybe we're in the forties or fifties, low fifties, and we show up to the live stream and we're already past 55 million at 12:00.

Neal Harmon: It was 10:00 AM.

Jordan Harmon: 10:00 AM on a Saturday. And we got on, we're like we're done.

Jeff Harmon: No more to do here.

Jordan Harmon: Thank you. Great job everybody. This is fantastic.

Neal Harmon: 55. But it really speaks, [00:15:00] it speaks to the same feeling that we had when we started this thing. 'cause we just felt this need to have better storytelling stories that amplify life for our posterity and for our own kids. And to have so many people step in, become Angel Guild members, vote with us, and then also become angel investors.

And we, yeah. And just as a side note, we named our company after these people. So they, the angel refers to the traditional angel investor that helped fund Broadway in New York that we named the company after that because we felt like it was regular people who just wanted to see something better for society that were making Angel possible.

Evan Shapiro: But it has that nice double entendre aspect.

Neal Harmon: Yes. Yeah.

Marion Ranchet: Yeah. Guys, you make it sound super easy. But so honestly,

Jordan Harmon: It's been so easy.

Marion Ranchet: It doesn't look easy. No, but you had seen, you saw a problem, you wanted to fix it. You had a vision for how to fix it, right? That's one thing.

But now on the [00:16:00] execution, how do you build a platform to do crowdfunding? Did you use a third party crowdfunding platform. Did you build your own from the beginning? And then also how do you start bringing content for people to vote and fund on? That wasn't, that's not easy. You are saying you were farmers.

Evan Shapiro: Yeah. If you can take Marion's point through to like, how did you transform from fundraising into this now the Guild membership that you used?

Neal Harmon: I'll let Jeff speak to the Guild membership more in detail, but just from a pedigree standpoint. Like I said, we got into marketing and technology and I wrote the very first version of the, of our company's code, and then now there's much smarter people who are helping,

Jeff Harmon: And it was just built on a WordPress blog .

Neal Harmon: Yeah, MPHP.

It was just dirty PHP, hacking. And we quickly outgrew that system and now we have over 80 engineers on our team. And if you look at actually how we spend our money, we are technology [00:17:00] and a marketing company. And so we built this entire platform from the ground up.

If you go onto your Angel app, it's available on all major smart TVs, streaming platforms. You can download the Angel app on Samsung, LG Vizio, Apple, Roku, et cetera.

Evan Shapiro: All right. Enough commercial.

Neal Harmon: We built, we sorry. But we built it. I'm just proud of the fact that it's our

Evan Shapiro: Yeah. It's hard. People think that you built one app.

Marion Ranchet: And from day one you did that. You could have used someone else's platform at the beginning and test cetera. You build it from day one and then iterated. And yeah.

Neal Harmon: And the reason that we built it that way Marion, is because we needed, 'cause the platforms that are out there are very like cookie cutter, and then it's based on what everybody says that should be done.

Marion Ranchet: Yeah.

Neal Harmon: And what we needed is the ability to go and have regular people inside of our company launch, have an assumption in the morning, launch a test. Test it with 5% of the audience, get the results, and then celebrate either a win or a [00:18:00] loss. We needed to have the entire growth of this network and audience, and every new feature that we ever add, it needs to be tested into the experience.

And doing that with, we had to do it from the ground up in order to do it that way because there wasn't an option available to us.

Jeff Harmon: Which takes years to build.

Jordan Harmon: Yeah. It takes years to build. And one of the key elements of the culture that's really important to us for our company is we really lean into extreme autonomy where we want people to be able to actually go and operate and execute in really meaningful ways.

My favorite part of pushing that into the culture as founders for the last years is now we see, man on a daily basis, we have an Angel's win in our slack where you'll see this random win pops up where it's I just tested this assumption. We made this adjustment or this design change and I didn't even know it was happening. And it's got a 5% lift in conversion rate or a 3% decrease in churn.

And it's like these, the team is, it's really important for us that we enable, Neal said people smarter people than us to go and execute [00:19:00] at a really high level. That's what we hired 'em for.

Evan Shapiro: Jordan, that's a really cruciate crucial element there, which is you've empowered people way down the org chart from you to take chances, test and learn, fail and learn, and you celebrate the victories, but you're also not, you're not crushing the stuff that didn't work either you. That, that kind of empowerment down the org chart is very unusual, but that's how you operate, right?

Jordan Harmon: A hundred percent.

Jeff Harmon: We also. We tell the team members, expect your experiments to lose or do nothing nine outta 10 times. You need to just fail and fail and fail. And it's usually 90% of the time you're gonna, you're gonna see no results or negative results. But that 10% of the time makes it, is what progresses the company.

And this feature has allowed us to even, there were some engineers that got together and they decided to launch a ticketing system on the TV. So if you go to an Angel TV app, you can actually see a trailer for a movie in [00:20:00] theaters, select to purchase tickets, pick your location that you want to buy tickets at, select your seats, buy it with your remote, and then get a text message with your tickets.

It's what the only, you can't do that kind of stuff on a TV app if you are using out of the box stuff. You can't.

Evan Shapiro: And that was not mandated as a top down edict. That came from the bottom up.

Jordan Harmon: No. There's a saying that I believe it was Charlie Munger that says, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.

And so it goes beyond just us saying, Hey, we want extreme autonomy. We've also created incentive structures as founders at what's called basically the founder's plan, where we're pushing all the employees to say, we want you to look at this company as if you started this company. We want you to think about Angel as if this was your baby, just as much as it is ours.

And so we've created in a you, this is, you should probably go over this section,

Neal Harmon: so we have. Market-based compensation at Angel for cash and equity comp. But we built on [00:21:00] top of that an additional component that when the company grows to 10 billion in market valuation, there's an additional 10% kicker that goes to the entire team based on merit.

And so they've got their market based comp and then they get an additional 10% of the company by helping the shareholders and everybody win. And this is, we implemented this plan in 2023. And we've seen the greatest innovations at Angel since innovating.

Evan Shapiro: Yeah. And I think you have a roadmap to get to that $10 billion, which means a billion dollars in equity going to the team.

Neal Harmon: Correct. And then we're, and then we intend to go and take that plan from 10 to a hundred as well and up the plant.

Evan Shapiro: You have, I love a BHAG, a big hair audacious goal is the term there.

But let's put a pin in that. 'cause I wanna get, I wanna talk about that pathway for a second, but going back to Marion's question, how do you get from the crowdfunding investment model to the Guild community-based model?

[00:22:00] You empower you actually do not green light films or projects that your members, the people who pay to subscribe and join your platform, they have to green light everything. Is that, am I getting that correct?

Jeff Harmon: Yeah. Yes. The Angel Guild is a group of 1.5 million plus people who have, who can vote on every single project that comes into Angel.

Right now there's I think over 50 films being voted on inside of Angel and you, they're voting on those and if they veto them, we cannot take them. This is the only studio that has ever done this where if the audience, specifically this core group called the Angel Guild, who have joined specifically for this purpose, if they say, no, we can't take a film, I can't take a film as the chief content officer and honestly the chief content officers a little bit, content in other companies is very different than what I do. My job is just to build the guild and make sure that the audience [00:23:00] and the guild and the filmmakers are talking. My job is not to go in and be the seer of what's going to work. It's long term.

Evan Shapiro: It's not a binary decision here. It's they get to vote and then they can give notes, and then the filmmaker can take those notes, adapt, and come back to the guild.

Is that right?

Jeff Harmon: Exactly, yes. As a guild member, you get to give the filmmakers feedback and you can see when the filmmakers have read your comments and they can comment back and ask questions of you. And then the filmmaker's using it as a pool. Not all 1.5 million people vote on every single project.

There's a statistical sample of the 1.5 million on each project. And then the filmmaker can say, I love this feedback, I'm gonna go change it, and then resubmit their film and see if they can bring their score up.

And this concept came because, as Idaho Farm Boys, we had three TV stations, and I could count the [00:24:00] number of movies I watched in the theaters on my hands growing up. So as we got into this and we saw people starting to submit movies and TV shows to Angel, I had charged forward with Dry Bar Comedy, which is a huge TV series. It's got 6 billion views now. It's a big success.

I'd done Charge Forward to help Rhe Chosen get launched, and we did the first couple seasons of The Chosen and Tuttle Twins and I had success, but I was quickly seeing like I, I'm not going to be able to pick all the winners and I can't even keep up with the number of movies that are being submitted to me.

And maybe it's just I don't like watching that many movies in a week. But I didn't wanna be watching them all.

And so as I was reading James Surowiecki's book, the Wisdom of Crowds, there was an aha moment for me where I was like, oh, we should be asking everybody that has invested all these angel [00:25:00] investors that have invested in Angel, we should be asking them what they think, which movies they want to see on Angel.

So let's just submit. And so I took the, there's principles in Wisdom of Crowds and we've created what we call the Wisdom of the Guild, and we're basically taking that user method from the previous where we pick things we want to watch, we picking the products we want, and it turns out lots of other people want it. This is the user method en mass.

And so the Wisdom of the Guild is you get a filmmaker to submit the entire film. You get 1.5 million people from 170 countries is where the guild's located. And you sample them in a statistical way that's blind. They can't see what other people are voting.

And you find out do they like the movie and what's what's come of this is that our Rotten Tomato scores on audience can never predict the credits. But the audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes, on average, we score around 93% on Rotten [00:26:00] Tomatoes with audiences, which is almost 10 points higher than the next one, which is Paramount Plus.

Evan Shapiro: Yeah. But you can't monetize Rotten Tomatoes. So what's happened is their hit rate is not just right on Rotten Tomatoes, their hit rate is right at the box office.

Just to, and I'm gonna drop all these stats in my traditional infographic way on my Substack when we drop this episode. So you can go there and take a look at them.

But over the last three years, over the last two and a half years, 23, 24, and half through 25, you have the highest average box office release per film in independent film. Gigher than A24. Actually more than double, actually triple A24's average focus comes the closest to you. So yours is about 34 or 35 million. Focuses is about 30 million. A24's is under 10 million per film.

On top of that, your total box office over the last two [00:27:00] and a half years, so 23, 24, halfway through 25, you've done approximately, you can check me on this, about $416 million in total box office.

Now, your second place over that time of all independent labels to A24 who has 525 million, but they released 53 films and you released 12. That's a kind of a remarkable hit rate. So the box, Rotten Tomatoes is wonderful, but in reality, the rubber hits the road at the box office.

And Jordan, this is, you are the distribution master here. How do you maintain that level of successfilm after film? It is remarkable.

Jordan Harmon: When we started looking at theatrical, Jeff's first mandate was, we don't understand this industry. We need to go look and collect as much data as physically possible as we go dabble in this world. And to see

Jeff Harmon: if it's really a broken industry.

Jordan Harmon: And because everybody's no theatricals really broken. It's gonna die and [00:28:00] go away.

Jeff Harmon: You can't survive it. And so it's just, can we get a whole bunch of data and see what is it truly broken?

Jordan Harmon: See what's happening here? And so the first thing is as again, tech and marketing backgrounds is everything that we do, you have to be able to see, every, everything's about being able to see what's in front of you. And the way you see what's in front of you is through the data that's happening in real time.

If you don't have real-time data, you're as blind and as and in the dark as anybody else out there. You can have your hypothesis and your theories about how it's gonna go, but you're just guessing. And so that was the first thing.

And the first thing that we wanted to do is we basically went and we were told to everybody you'll never get the data, you'll never be able to get those relationships.

And so we spent basically two years, Jared Gizi, our chief distribution officer, spent two years building relationships with the different ticketing platforms and the different exhibitors. And Brandon Purdy our executive vice president of the actual distribution, he had relationships with almost all the domestic distributor or exhibitors.

And so over a two year period, we built out this data integration to where now we have [00:29:00] real-time data on all of our platforms of people buying tickets for 90 plus percent of all exhibitors in the nation. And it allows for us to be able to go and say, okay. I, we know as marketers that we don't actually need to go for a movie to be successful, we don't need 360 million people in the United States to know about the movie.

We don't, and there's not 360 million people who wanna know about that movie. That movie doesn't appeal to everybody. We just need the right four to 10 million people to know about that movie, right? That's where you have to hone in.

And so this process of collecting all that data. We were also shocked when we got done with the data integrations and we asked our partners so who else has asked you for this? And they're like, no one's ever asked us for this. I was like, it's 2022. It's 2022 and people are spending hundreds of billions of dollars of marketing the box office every year and no one's even asked you for the data? Like it just blew our mind.

Jeff Harmon: And so that was also a moment where we're like, we can disrupt this industry.

Jordan Harmon: [00:30:00] Yeah. We're like, okay, theaters are not broken. This is a really meaningful channel.

Evan Shapiro:The people who distribute film are broken. That's who's broken, right?

Jordan Harmon: Yes. The model, the gatekeeper model and the antiquated model is very, very broken. And so that process, that multi-year process, putting us in a position where we can scale up and down our P&A based off of the data we're seeing in real time, and then it's allowed for us to put ourselves in a position where we don't actually build off of and model off of how do we get the next Sound of Freedom.

Everybody always looks at us and says, how do you get the next Sound of Freedom? Or how do you get the next King of Kings? Those big box office blow, those things that blow up and we're like, we don't care.

We are building a model where we are successful off of base hits. It's okay if we do five, 10, 20 million, $30 million box offices as long as we spent accordingly on our P&A. It doesn't actually matter.

If it breaks out and we know and we can see the data breaking out, we can scale up to go do a King of Kings or a Sound of Freedom. But, we don't [00:31:00] have to do that. We can leverage the data we have to make better real-time decisions. And so it's been very fun to watch as this has evolved and as people call us and like, how are you guys doing this?

What are you doing? I'm like well, we we get a movie that the Guild loves, so we know the audience loves it, and then we go find the people who also love that movie and we sell them tickets.

Jeff Harmon: It turn, it turns out that so we're experts at marketing and we marketed Squatty Potties and that made a huge viral hit with Squatty Potties.

Selling a theatrical seat is not that different than selling a Squatty Potty

Jordan Harmon: Sales in general is a very psychology Yeah.

Evan Shapiro: You're squatting both industries.

Jordan Harmon: Yeah, squatting both industries. But it's all the same psychology. Human behavior is this. And so it's understanding and Jeff and I did sales for, to pay for college and stuff.

And so we understood from, even when I was selling potatoes for him door to door, and he was selling potatoes when we were like 10, 11, 12, 13 years old.

Jeff Harmon: Yeah. 11 years old. We were selling Idaho potatoes in Utah door to door to earn money.

Jordan Harmon: And so it's just learning that psychology of how [00:32:00] people understand and what, how you can fulfill their needs and what they need in a really meaningful way.

And so it's it's been really exciting, but it's also exciting because the theater business is far from dead. It is a beautiful business, it just needs to be managed appropriately.

Jeff Harmon: Yeah. I think one thing that people need to understand is theaters are where culture changes the most. The conversations around social media revolve a lot around what's going on in theaters.

Scorsese explained this Cinema Cannes a few years back where he just said the conversations started in the cinema. And we see that. And there's a really great blog post on the Rabbit Room blog that is called The Sacrament of the Cinema. And it's, if you look at the age demographics of movie theaters, it's actually now younger. The average age of movie theaters goers is 30 years old.

Evan Shapiro: Yeah, it's younger than any other media except maybe TikTok.

Jeff Harmon: Except for maybe [00:33:00] TikTok. I don't have the, but it's younger than Instagram. It's younger than YouTube. It's the youngest demographic.

And the reason why I think is because when you go to church, the reason why they call it sacrament is you voluntarily give up all your distractions. And as a community, you focus on this sacrament or the communion or the Lord's Supper, whatever it is your faith tradition calls it, and you focus on it together as a community. And there's no pause button, there's no play button there. There's no way to stop. You all focus on it together and you can have a life changing experience.

The same thing happens when you go to the theater. You voluntarily surrender your social media, your phones, you disconnect. And you as a community

Evan Shapiro: You should. Not everybody does.

Marion Ranchet: Not everyone does.

Jeff Harmon: I think this is why young people go to the theater though, is 'cause they do want to disconnect. They want to disconnect and maybe the boomers are still pulling out their phones, but young people want to disconnect and what's happening is you go in and you sit down and you get this [00:34:00] experience together.

You can't, you have to hold it if you need to go to the bathroom and whether or not every filmmaker knows this, whether or not you want to agree with it, when you're at home and you can pause and go to the bathroom, grab an ice cream, it changes the flow of the movie. It changes the experience.

And so you just have, it's a different type of life changing experience you can have in front of the theater. And we just wanna make sure that as many of those life changing experiences are for amplifying light and doing good and teaching families principles and anyway, that's my preaching on the cinema.

Marion Ranchet: But one, one question for you guys, just to be sure on the model, right? When a movie was, voted for, let's go, let's do it. What's the windowing strategy? Do you always go to theater and then goes to streaming? Do you do both? Do you do streaming only? How does that work?

Neal Harmon: So this year we'll release over a hundred films and we will release eight in [00:35:00] theaters.

Marion Ranchet: Okay.

Neal Harmon: Some of these films will be licensed films that the Guild loves and that fit the curated library of stories. And some of them will be originals and and then everyone that we take to the theaters is an original.

We'd like to get to 12 releases a year as a company. And then, but we'll have a much more robust release cycle than that.

Evan Shapiro: And what is your streaming model, is it a subscription model? Is it a player?

Neal Harmon: Yeah. So the for a theatrical release, it goes to theaters and then it, then the guild gets to see it.

Actually, if you go back, the Guild a, a sample of the Guild gets to see it before it goes to theaters to vote on it, then it goes to theaters, and then it goes to the entire guild and then and then to PVOD.

Jeff Harmon: They get early Access. Guild members get early access.

Neal Harmon: Yeah. PVOD and everything

Evan Shapiro: And Guild are paying a membership fee to belong, correct?

Jeff Harmon: Yeah. And the Guild actually gets two movie tickets. The premium members in the Guild, they get two movie tickets at every Angel release. So it's like a movie pass [00:36:00] for Angel movies.

Neal Harmon: But after the guild gets to see it, Marion, then it mirrors a lot the traditional release cycle that you'd see. Well, license to Netflix or Prime or to some partner for this, for the SVOD window. Or broadcast and other types of distribution.

Evan Shapiro: And you're doing series too, not just films?

Neal Harmon: Correct. We have a handful of series and from Tuttle Twins to The Wayfinders to we just had

Jeff Harmon: Testament.

Neal Harmon: A Week Away came out last week. Testament came out last month. So there's a number of series that are also,

Jordan Harmon: It's been very exciting because it's this as farmers you grew up in an environment where you spend a significant amount of time nurturing the ground, planting the seeds, cultivating the seeds with the hope that you're gonna have this incredible harvest at the end of this experience.

There's a lot of similarities. Neal's pointed out many times around that with entertainment and that we've spent the last four to six years building out the infrastructure, [00:37:00] developing the relationships, developing the projects. And in 2025, I believe both from a series and film standpoint, we're basically releasing more film and TV in 2025 than the last five years combined.

And it's a function of people are like, wow, you guys are really, pumping stuff out. And it's a function of, these are projects that have been in development or in relationships with us for the last, 1, 2, 3, 4 years.

And yes, it's culminating to this moment, which is really exciting. But the, we're at a place now where I love seeing comments on social media where people say I'm getting my fill, like I can literally just watch Angels movies and TV shows and I don't even need to go to Netflix or Prime right now.

Now, that's not to say that people are canceling Netflix or Prime, but that being said it's now getting to a point where all of their entertainment needs are starting to be met on Angel.

Neal Harmon: And I think it's funny that he says four to six years, 'cause that's when Jordan came back. Like he, he did a subscription [00:38:00] business.

Evan Shapiro: The youngest kid is always that kid.

Neal Harmon: This has been a 12, 13 year journey. And Jeff, but Jordan,

Jordan Harmon: But on the original content side is been four to six years.

Evan Shapiro: But hey so this has been a 12 to 13 year journey. And now let's get back Neal, to that pathway to a bi $10 billion valuation. And to use Jordan's analogy of the fertile ground being seeded. You're about to have a real moment here. We're recording this prior to this happening, but the day this podcast drops, you are going public.

And so you're gonna be a much different company on the other side of this to talk about the decision to go public, talk about the machinery of it, and what you hope to accomplish by doing this.

Neal Harmon: Anyone who's been a public company would wish being a public company upon anyone, right?

It's a very rigorous process to go through. A lot of red tape, a lot of bureaucracy. But I think if there's any company that would fit being a public company, it would be Angel because we are owned by so many [00:39:00] people. And when we, the first time we did a crowdfunding round in 2016 and 8,000 families came in for $10 million, that triggered some things for us, that when we hit 50 million in assets, we had two years and 120 days to be a public company.

And that happened for us in April of last year. And we, as a board decided what do, okay, now we have all the pain of public reporting. When do we start trading Angel stock? And we, the Guild was in, its, it was a fledgling system, like it, it had been years in the making, but it wasn't, we could see it really clearly where the Guild was headed, but the market couldn't yet see it.

And so we said when we hit a million Guild members, that's gonna be the checkpoint. That's the point at which the story will support Angel being a publicly traded company and for all this community to be able to celebrate through a stocks symbol, which it will be ANGX as of today.

And it is crazy that you guys are launching your season today. And then [00:40:00] the New York Stock Exchange asked us to do the the bell ringing ceremony on today. Yeah, serendipity, but this is, but that symbol, it represents these people's movement. We, as founders, we've locked up our shares.

Evan Shapiro: So wait, how many shares do we get as a result of.

Just kidding. I'm just kidding.

Neal Harmon: There's, they're available right now. Right now.

Evan Shapiro: I can buy as many as I want.

Neal Harmon: But ANGX. For us, X represents technology. It also represents the next generation. And and this symbol will be a symbol of the Angels movement. And and this is bigger than us as founders. We wanna build something that outlasts us. And this is an important step in that process and important part of this community story.

And we're just grateful to be able to share this moment with you, Evan, that you had a vision for how this can change independent filmmaking. And we hope that the model can be adopted and embraced particularly letting[00:41:00] the people decide.

Like there's a lot of people who wanna copy our model in other ways, but letting the people decide and getting their feedback and facilitating that conversation between filmmakers and the audience, the culture only wins because that conversation's happening. Yeah. Thank you.

Evan Shapiro: Sure.

Jeff Harmon: Yeah. This doesn't just have to be a values play. It can be like many studios could do this.

Marion Ranchet: Yeah. That was my question. You mentioned folks copying you. Have you considered, launching sub labels or building this, I'm sorry for the comparison, but like McDonald's did, right?

Essentially there's a playbook, but maybe someone else is gonna be best positioned to do the aha version of Angel or, any other genre. Are you seeing this happening or are you more in a setup where you will be controlling the entire thing and you could go more genre based with different vehicles, but still within your group?

Neal Harmon: Go ahead.

Jordan Harmon: I was gonna say, I think the technology [00:42:00] we're building and the infrastructure we're building is specific for the, that north star of amplifying light. But I do wanna like drill in a little bit on the term genre. Because what we've noticed over the years as founders is that the broader the Guild gets, the more genre-neutral that mission is.

Meaning, we had a project that is called Brave the Dark. It's this incredible film starring Jared Harris. And it's about this boy who experiences extremely traumatic as a little boy his parent, his father murder, suicide of his father and his mother, right in front of his eyes.

Jeff Harmon: True story.

Jordan Harmon: It's this true story. It, the guild passed it with flying colors. It was this very heavy,

Evan Shapiro: Dark for you guys.

Jordan Harmon: Yeah. It's very dark. But it had this really redemptive storyline at the end where you started seeing the truth in the whole story and how he was able to pull out of that experience because of an incredible teacher who took him aside and mentored him through all that. [00:43:00]

That, five years ago, people wouldn't have said that's an Angel movie. Sketch for example, that just came out in, into theaters.

Evan Shapiro: Yeah, fantasy based, right?

Jordan Harmon: It's this, it's very fantasy. It's it's got a little bit of thriller horror fill to it, adventure tinges to it. It's got multiple genres built into it. But that's gonna happen more and more where, I always like to say there are multiple films that had they gone through the Angel Guild, they could have been angel movies based off of my experience.

Some of those would be Godzilla Minus One. I think Godzilla Minus One going through the Angel system would've passed Angel Guild because it's, there's so much truth built into that. And it's this beautiful story of courage and redemption in this really powerful way. He, Neal mentioned Cinderella Man. If we had been existing during that time period, that would've been a movie that.

Evan Shapiro: You have a sports movie coming out, which I think the trailer calls it Geriatric Rudy.

Jordan Harmon: Yeah. Little bit of that.

Evan Shapiro: Michael Chiklis as like a 52-year-old, 50 year senior on a

Marion Ranchet: American college.

Evan Shapiro: Is it a college football team or is it a high school [00:44:00] football team?

Jordan Harmon: It's college football team. And

Jeff Harmon: It's a true story. 59-year-old.

Jordan Harmon: It's a true story. And without getting into things that aren't publicly announced, we have projects that we've been working with filmmakers on that kind of fall into the horror category a little bit.

They're a little horror thriller, but they're doing it in a way that's teaching some really valuable principles that are following the North star of amplifying light, which is, it has to follow the truth, honest noble, authentic, admirable, and excellent.

Now our, if we ever have a horror movie, it's not gonna look like the entertainment horror traditional entertainment horror. But and not to say that we're gonna have, a ton of horror, I'm just saying the amplifying light mission genre is genre neutral.

It is going to have. Genres all over the place that are gonna come in and are gonna teach incredible things through it.

Evan Shapiro: It's super interesting. When I was growing up and I'm, I think I'm the oldest person on this podcast.

But, even sci-fi starts,

Jordan Harmon: Neal shaking his head. Now we gotta figure out.

Evan Shapiro: I'm definitely the oldest person on this podcast. There's no question [00:45:00] about it. But the, but every, everything, even the dangerous stuff had a kind of level of optimism at the end of it. And now we lack that in our popular entertainment. And I do feel like the reason why the world is so apocalyptic is because we lack the imagination to see a good future in a lot of our popular entertainment.

Regarding, regardless of values-based or just other points of view, the lack of optimism in content is really, I think, self-fulfilling to a certain extent.

Jordan Harmon: No, and I think you're nailing on something really important that I'd love to just spend a couple minutes on, and that is, as people start studying entertainment throughout all cultures and throughout history, you start realizing that entertainment has always been upstream from culture. And culture is upstream from politics.

And so when we look at the, the anxiety and the depression and the devastation that's happening throughout the world and the divide that's happening throughout the world, it is a function of, if you look at entertainment from 20, when we [00:46:00] launched Angel, the two most popular shows were House of Cards and Game of Thrones.

Evan Shapiro: Yeah.

Jordan Harmon: Now, don't get me wrong, the storytellers and I'm, I haven't be seen either of those series, but I've heard

Evan Shapiro: Oh, great shows. But really dark.

Jordan Harmon: They did an incredible job. But they, yeah very incredible storytelling, but very dark and a lot of division and a lot of the nihilistic type stuff. And the more that's predominantly viewed in the entertainment, the more our culture's gonna look like that in 20 or 30 years.

And so this counterbalance of being able to tell incredible stories at the same level, at the same level of entertainment and like wow, this is super good. But having those hope elements to them pulling out and at the end of the store, we think is really important for our culture.

Evan Shapiro: Yeah. And let me just apologize for cursing. You'll have to bleep that out for the Guilde members, but the, I think there's another element to this as well. I think everybody, and I, Marion and I talk about the creator economy a lot. But I think it's a misnomer in that I think corporate America, and you're about to become a publicly [00:47:00] traded corporation, can participate in what I'm hoping to reframe as the affinity economy, which I think you guys define to a T but it also depends on treating, everyone made a big deal out of Ryan Kugler's deal with Warner Brothers for Sinners, as it was this unusual thing.

But your deals with creators, your deals with filmmakers really are very different -- and I think where the market is heading. Can you explain that really quickly?

Jordan Harmon: Yeah. The that was one of the things that we just didn't understand when we got into this space. I think we got into it thinking we're gonna, we're gonna.

Great, tell great stories for our families. And and then every step of the way we'd be like that doesn't make sense. So we gotta reinvent that, and that doesn't make sense. We gotta reinvent that. And one of those things that we ran into was the incentive structure that's been built for decades, and then really made worse with the streaming world, was that you had these distributors partnering with these producers and historically, the distributors would take their distribution fees and their ad overhead fees and their [00:48:00] distribution costs, and they would stack all their general overhead into their distribution costs. And at the bottom of the waterfall, there might be a sliver of rev share that happens at the bottom.

They, the promise of backend, but it never materialized.

And it created this in this incentive for all the producers to say I'm never gonna make money on my backend, so I've gotta, I've gotta make as much and live off of my production budgets as I physically possibly can. And the Netflix came in and said, Hey, let's call a spade.

We know that the other studios are almost never paying you on your backend. We're gonna cover your production budgets plus 20%. So they did this cost plus model and initially a lot of the filmmakers were really excited about it because they looked at it and said I've got my

Evan Shapiro: Guaranteed income, Yeah.

Jordan Harmon: My guaranteed income, and I get 20% on top of it.

But anybody who's been in business knows that anytime a cost plus model is put into place, the costs go up because you have zero incentive to keep costs down at that point, and you have zero incentive to make sure that you go the last 10% of what turns art from good to exceptional. From good to mastery.[00:49:00]

And because all you have to do is just get past the gatekeepers. And so there's this hockey stick curve of production budgets going through the roof with the streaming era that's unsustainable.

And so what we did is we looked at it and said, we've got, we can't do the old way where you have all these fees up and down the line because that's creating incentive structure issues. And we can't do the new way where we're just basically taking all the upside because it's gonna hike up all the production costs.

And so we created an entirely new waterfall where we said, we're gonna remove all the distribution fees, all the ad overhead fees. We're not making any margin on marketing. We're not making any margin on distribution costs. We write this into our agreements so that our producing partners know that we are, we're serious about this.

And we are basically taking the marketing costs out first for their actual project. The actual hard costs, that's the cost for billboards and Meta ads and YouTube and TV and whatever it is. Those hard costs come out first.

And then you have your actual distribution expenses that are your actual distribution expenses.

Evan Shapiro: Sending DCPS to theater.

Jordan Harmon: This is sending DCPS to theaters. This [00:50:00] is credit card fees. These are the actual expenses of distributing your project.

And then if we win together for all licensing revenues, two thirds of all profits go to the filmmakers and their investors, and one third goes to Angel.

Now, if we lose, neither of us make any money. And that's just the reality of of our model. We actually had a, I won't say who it was out of respect to him, but a big CFO. He's now a CFO of one of one of the studios. He, before he took that job, came in and basically did a comparison where he is like, I love what you guys are doing. I wanna just compare.

We contract him to compare what traditional Hollywood does to ours. And he is he got done with it and he said you got two really interesting data points here. One, if you don't hit at a way higher success rate than other studios, you are going to die.

He's like, 'cause everybody else makes all their margin across every nickeling and dimming across the board. He's like and two, if you guys have success, there is not another studio that's even close to paying out the same amount of upside that you [00:51:00] guys are gonna do.

And that's one of the things that we've consistently said is that timeless art deserves timeless residuals. Timeless entertainment deserves timeless residuals and.

And we've taken that a step further where we said, even for our own streaming platform for all licensing revenues, it's two thirds to the profits goes to them and one third Angel for our own platform where we have, 80 plus engineers and 200 something employees and managing that platform.

Instead of us just giving a one-time licensing fee to put something on our platform, we're doing 50% of all profits after our marketing and actual platform costs are going back to the producers and their investors, and it's allowing for this incredible model that should have existed forever.

And kind of existed in the broadcast world with residuals in television is that you had these, every time a contract got renewed, all these residuals got distributed among all the actors and talent writers. And it set them for life. If they had a really meaningful project, and that's disappeared.

Neal Harmon: One producer, [00:52:00] one producer called us after the last royalty payouts and said, I think you made a mistake. I think you added a zero

Jordan Harmon: To my royalty.

Neal Harmon: To my wire. And we said, look at the report, like that's exactly what you got paid.

Evan Shapiro: And that's an anecdote that has never been told in Hollywood before.

Jordan Harmon: And we're small. Like we, to Jeff's point, we have 1.5 million members. And so as we continue to grow, it's exciting that. The example I, that I've been given permission to give is the, we know the producer really well of Lost on Mountain Maine. His name's Dick Boyce, but he worked with Sylvester Stallone on this movie that went to theaters, did this small release, and then one of the major streamers wanted to pick it up.

And he, Dick was like, you know what? I can take the one time check from the streamer and likely never get a full recruitment, or I can go with Angel and have the possibility of this having some significant upside. And so he partnered with us as a friend and we were in our infancy at that point. I think we had 300,000 members when we signed that agreement.

Neal Harmon: That's right.

Jordan Harmon: And [00:53:00] and he called us after the first royalty. He said, I made more in four months than I would've made over my three year Netflix license with Angel. And he is this is just remarkable.

And that's with 1.5 million, at the time 1 million Guild members when he lost.

And so it's just, it's gonna be fun to watch that continue to grow. The gravitational pull. Every time we send out royalty checks, we get an onslaught of new titles coming into the ecosystem. So it's fun.

Neal Harmon: I'd love to bring this back to Marion's last question, which was whether we plan to like white label this or what we plan to do otherwise.

Marion Ranchet: Or go international. We haven't mentioned international, but yeah. You're very domestic right now. Yeah.

Neal Harmon: So Angel's goal is to succeed in the domestic market. And then probably somewhere between five and 10 million Guild members will start a addressing other international markets where we'll build a specific guild that's already kind of happening.

We had a title come up through Brazil that's a Portuguese title, and it passed high enough to be released everywhere, but eventually there'll [00:54:00] be a Brazilian Guild and

Jordan Harmon: Language based guilds. Y

Neal Harmon: Yeah, language based and geography based Guilds. We're not gonna do, we've had lots of people ask us if we're gonna do something like a specific faith guild, and we don't see it that way.

We see it these as just representing the general audience. That's the kind of statistical significance.

Jeff Harmon: General values audience.

Neal Harmon: General values audience on the statistical significance we're looking for. So that's the and we're dealing in a four quadrant, huge market like Angel, we need to stay focused there, but we see lots of potential for a, there could be a horror genre guild, or there could be a documentary based guild, or there could be something that's not values oriented that has some other uniting feature in the community.

Jordan Harmon: And other studios. Imitation's the greatest sincere form of flattery.

Neal Harmon: And there was a, there's a studio that came out recently, it's called Waterfall. That, but the thing that they missed is that they're not actually listening to the, they're listening to the audience for feedback, and a lot of people do that but giving the [00:55:00] audience the actual power.

Marion Ranchet: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Shapiro: That's, that is the thing is like you say that.

Marion Ranchet: You fired yourselves. You fired yourselves. No one.

Evan Shapiro: Yes.

Marion Ranchet: But you're the Chief Content Officer, and I'm sorry to say, but those movies are being made without you, in a way.

Neal Harmon: A24 is doing tickets for their, for, there are other elements.

Marion Ranchet: They're doing bits and pieces.

Jeff Harmon: To build a good deal that they'll give them power.

The, if you, one thing, just to Jordan's point, I just want to, like any filmmaker who's watching, if you go to angel.com/filmmaker, you can just use a little calculator and you can see what was like

Jordan Harmon: Based off the last quarter's reports.

Jeff Harmon: Last quarter's reports, you can just play with it and say, if I got this percentage of minutes, watch, this is what I would've been paid.

And you can just go play with that.

Jordan Harmon: And for us, the reason we do that is 'cause transparency is a great cleanser for the pain and the suffering of the last decades of the entertainment industry.

If we can create a transparent model, it's gonna cause for a [00:56:00] lot more trust and a lot more understanding between the producer and distributor relationship in a really meaningful way. And 'cause that's been so strained for so many decades and so much frustration for obvious reasons.

Evan Shapiro: The power of your model is the community itself. They all vote, but those 1.5 million members also market on your behalf too. They are your kind of ground zero for word of mouth. And so by ceding the power to them, by giving the full authority of your organization to the members who you serve, you've basically enabled a virtuous cycle. And I mean that in every form of the word.

Where their success is your success. Your success is their success, and they're rooting for you title by title. But it is that lack of top-down model. It is the ceding of the power to the audience itself. That phrase makes most C-suites butts clinch.

Jeff Harmon: Yeah. It's because the C-suites [00:57:00] the issue the gatekeepers, the issue.

It's not the filmmakers. The filmmakers actually love this. The filmmakers are coming in and they're just blown away at the model. They're blown away at the feedback.

Jordan Harmon: They don't believe us at first.

Jeff Harmon: They don't believe it at first, but they're just, but they,

Jordan Harmon: You can bypass something.

Jeff Harmon: And the filmmakers are happy to make values based content that I, that's not the only thing that a lot of them are gonna make. But when they do make this, we wanna be their home and the filmmakers go in and they're happy to just be connected with the audience and not have some gatekeeper. There's a dozen or two dozen people in Hollywood that make all the decisions.

Marion Ranchet: Yeah.

Jeff Harmon: And we're saying, we're just removing that group of people and we're putting it in the hands of this guild

Marion Ranchet: Of the community. Yeah.

Neal Harmon: And the filmmakers, for them to have that conversation together.

Jeff Harmon: Yep. Our job is to remove the barriers between the filmmaker and the Angel Guild, the community.

Evan Shapiro: This has been a great conversation. Yeah. Really remarkable. So many lessons I, and not just for film, I think for all entertainment to take away from this, the way you've approached it, [00:58:00] the understanding of your audience, the data-first way that you approached everything but also ultimately putting the community you serve at the center of your business and giving them the authority to run it for you. It's all just so remarkable.

And the fact that you've given us this time, ostensibly on the week and the very day that you're going public we're just truly grateful for your time and frankly, for your example out in the marketplace.

Thank you so much.

Marion Ranchet: Yeah. Thank you guys.

Jordan Harmon: Thank you both.

Neal Harmon: Thank you, Evan. Thank you. Thank you, Marion.

Evan Shapiro: That was an amazing conversation. So now it's time for our question of the week. Marion, and I think right out of our conversation with the Angel guys and they have nine siblings. That just boggles my mind.

Marion Ranchet: Yeah, I think it's four brother, one cousin in the company. That's yeah. It's a family business. They are so innovative. I've never heard of this model before. Never.

Evan Shapiro: It's, and I think there are people who like they're faith-based. They're not, they're values based, but regardless of what you think [00:59:00] about the content they make in particular, it's the ethos and the model that they bring to the business that's most important to focus on.

So my question to you of the week, what does this mean for the movie business?

Marion Ranchet: The one thing, it's all an ecosystem and I think we've lost track of that. The model they're bringing, it's very much 360, they learn from users. So essentially they're building what we want and they're taking a lot of the recipes, the best practices that we're seeing on YouTube, on social, et cetera.

Much more bottom up approach versus what we've been seeing in streaming, in Hollywood. That is very top down. Someone is deciding what you are gonna watch next summer.

So I think this this user centric approach and they're not leaving filmmakers on the side of the road. 'cause they could. They can not butt load of money. And, have a model, have the same Hollywood model, applying in the background they could right.

Evan Shapiro: [01:00:00] Yeah, and I think, what Jordan said about the transparency. I do think, and again, I'm not a moralistic person, but the virtuous nature of their business, which is it starts with the opinion of the audience, who it matters most to. And then the filmmaker is included in success every step of the way.

And they're gonna include their team and they push the power down to their, down the organizational chart to make decisions. Like so much of that is so antithetical to the Hollywood industrial complex, Even the newer entrants like Netflix and so forth.

And to me, it personifies what I've been talking about of late, which is it's not the creator economy, it's not the gatekeeper economy. There's this thing called the affinity economy. If you wanna know how it works, study Angel Studios, they're going public today. I have no doubt they'll be a $10 billion company in relatively short order.

Marion Ranchet: They're a billion dollar company right now, aren't they?

Evan Shapiro: We'll see what happens when they launch, but [01:01:00] yeah, that's, I think the target valuation at strike. Although it's happening as we're speaking right now. So we'll see. We can go look at it.

But I think it does beg the question, why is Jason Blum not doing this for horror?

Why is someone not doing this for comedy? Why? Why? You look at what Inoxtag did in your native country of France and with YouTube releasing a film on YouTube and then going in theaters and selling 300,000 tickets in France alone. Clearly, this is where it's all headed, right?

Marion Ranchet: Yeah I think the next move, unfortunately, I don't think it's gonna come from traditional media, at least not at that scale. And I think it's, you nicely tie it back to Inoxtag, who's a French YouTuber and what he did.

I think creators are understanding more and more that they need to live outside of social media, outside of YouTube, and they're making those moves of being multi vertical businesses, flywheels, et cetera. So they will be the [01:02:00] next ones to do that.

Speaking of Inoxtag, I'm working on getting him on the pod.

Evan Shapiro: Oh my God. If you could, he's my hero right now, so I would really

Marion Ranchet: Amazing.

Is that because he climbed the Everest or just from a business?

Evan Shapiro: No, because I, I don't have no desire to climb Everest. Yeah. I'm afraid of Heights, truth be known.

But yeah, no, the way that movie got distributed, the fact that he had an idea and he made the movie and in a documentary, I think he spent, a lot of money on that movie, but he wound up making it all back.

So to me that's, that's the model of what's going on. And we actually at Eshap announced that we're releasing our own creator led movie called Skit soon. So we're gonna be following Angel and Inoxtag and I wrote about that recently on my Substack.

Great episode. Like really I could have gone on for another hour. I think this is, I think they're gonna use this episode to teach film classes in the future. I hope they do. 'cause the lessons are I think really good.

Marion Ranchet: No, but I think if you look at what we've done in season one and what's coming up in season two, what we're looking at, we're looking, and it's a bit of [01:03:00] a, shout out to people who are listening to the pod and maybe they're doing so something cool and no one knows about it.

But we didn't know about Angel a few months ago. A lot of people did not. And what we're trying to do with the pod, we're showing people that there's different ways of being successful in media and entertainment today. And this is one of those examples.

We've had Dhar, Dhar Mann.

Evan Shapiro: Yeah, Dhar, yeah.

Marion Ranchet: Talking about scripted content on YouTube. We'll have more folks like that because I think we need new, fresh ideas.

Evan Shapiro: Yes, desperately the entertainment industry needs new ideas and new voices and I think the Angel boys personify that.

This is a great episode. Thanks again for being on our podcast together. That is Marion Ranchet.

Marion Ranchet: and that is Evan Shapiro.

Evan Shapiro: This is the Media Odyssey Podcast. Thanks for sticking around. We'll see you next week.

Marion Ranchet: Cheers.