Jim Orr & Brandon Purdie on Distribution Strategy & Why Content Is Still King

From script to screen, every film is brought to life by visionary creatives and executives, all sharing one mission to captivate the audience. Hosted by award-winning movie strategist Kevin Goetz, our podcast, Don't Kill the Messenger, offers a filmmaking masterclass through intimate conversations with Hollywood's most influential voices. And now, your host, Kevin Goetz. Listeners, buckle up. Today, we're talking distribution strategy. Years ago, distribution largely meant theatrical distribution. Today, it's a whole different game. As Dorothy famously said, Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore. We've gone from a relatively straightforward black-and-white business to a multi-dimensional one in Technicolor, where a film's path to an audience may include theaters, streaming, premium video on demand, social media, creator platforms, fan networks, direct audience engagement, and countless combinations of the above. My guests today represent two of the most influential approaches to navigating that landscape. Jim Ohr is president of domestic theatrical distribution at Universal Pictures, overseeing the release of some of the biggest films in the world. Brandon Purdy is executive vice president and head of theatrical distribution at Angel Studios, where he has helped pioneer a community-driven model for reaching audiences. Together, they sit at the center of one of the most important questions facing Hollywood today. How do films find the right audience and maximize profit in an entertainment landscape that has never been more complicated and has never been more competitive? And that is an understatement. Jim, Brandon, welcome to my show. Hey Kevin, thank you. I'm so glad to have you, Jim. I've got to start with you because you're the older one. By a mile. Age before beauty. No, Jim, I was struck by a line in your bio when I was doing research on this that said, unlike many executives who have spent their careers at a single company, Jim has seen distribution from the perspectives of a major studio, specialty label, independent distributor, and exhibition-facing sales organization. That is an interesting perspective. Yeah, I think that means I can't keep a job. I think that's what that translates into. And he's also got a great sense of humor. And it's a wry one, if you haven't noticed, listeners. Yeah, I started at Paramount Pictures at the end of 87, here in Sherman Oaks. I was there for seven or eight months, and Paramount sent me to Boston. I was a sales rep in Boston, and then down to New York, where I was a sales manager, branch manager, division manager. And then I came back out here to the studio. I was on Wayne Llewellyn's senior staff. Oh, Wayne Llewellyn. Yeah. When I think of Wayne Llewellyn, I think of a cigarette in his mouth and probably a drink in his hand. Yeah, yeah. He was known for both. Some refer to him as the Marlboro Man. He was such a, I don't know, how do you say this? All you guys were a different kind of ilk in our business. Always my favorites. Maybe it's because I'm from New York, and there was a real East Coast salesman approach to distribution when I entered the business. It's gotten a lot more corporate now. Yeah, a lot more corporate. Absolutely. But am I right? I'm talking about Barry London. Barry London, Jeff Blake. Barry Reardon. Danny. Bruce Schneider, Danny Fellman, Chuck Meehan. Yeah. The greatest, right? Absolute legends. Tom Sherrick. Tom Sherrick, yeah, absolutely. I mean, wow. And our good friend. Eric Lomas. Eric Lomas, yeah. May he rest in peace. But I have to tell you, they all lived kind of hard. Tom didn't live that hard. He was pretty laid back. Whether they were living hard or not, they were all larger than life. No doubt about that. Why do you think that is? I think that was their personalities. And I think that kind of a personality, especially back in the day in theatrical distribution, had a tendency. That was the cream that rose to the top. Well, that's what I'm saying. It's the sales approach. It's the sales mentality. They were very good at developing phenomenal relationships with exhibition and also being very, very tough at exactly the same time. I want to mention another word, Jim, and you're going to agree. Loyalty. Oh, very much so. That was Wayne's mantra. I must have heard him say a million times, we are a relationship company. And that didn't mean we were easy to get along with. That just meant we gave and got from those that we had relationships with and in order to further our goals and to get the very most out of every single film that we could. But yeah, very much so. And it's sort of like, you burn me at your own peril. Oh, a hundred percent. Like if you commit on talking, say, a distributor talking to an exhibitor. If an exhibitor is talking to a distributor, they may say, you're going to take my movie, right? Yes. And if they renege, forget about it. Wayne had a great saying that we all lived by, which was when talking about the relationship with exhibition can get a little cantankerous, to say the least. And he had a great saying to exhibition. If it got to a level that it probably shouldn't. He said, I tell you what, you make the rules and I'll play by them. That gave me chills because you realize you could be effed if you if you because the rules change weekly. He would use it against you, no doubt about it. Brandon, you've had a lifelong career in film. What I love is you started at age 14, which I want to unpack in two seconds. And now, of course, you're a distinguished leader with a 24 year career in theatrical distribution. And Angel Studios is a model, as I've made it no secret, I'm completely in awe of and what you've created being an audience advocate. And the fact that Angel, of course, relies on its audience for most of its key decisions. First of all, welcome. Thank you. And tell me about your story. How do you begin at 14 in our business? I came up through movie theaters. But before that, my dad's an actor on stage. So I grew up on the stage. What was his name? Dennis Pretty. We always like to call out the rents. But hold on. Tell me, where were you from? I grew up in Utah, a small town called Plotting Grove, Utah. There was a still plant in the town. And my dad was a mailman. I was in Kanab last night. OK. So I was in Utah yesterday at the Best Friends Animal Society, where they have one of the largest no-kill shelters. And wow, it was a long drive to St. George. You work in the local movie theater? Yeah, I grew up and started working in a local movie theater and then worked at a Carmike and just kind of worked around in cinemas and then went into management of a small regional theater chain, which is kind of a legend in its own right. Tony and Rudman owned West States Theaters. I worked for them. And then I worked up into a regional manager and did that and then finished school, got married, had kids. And in my mind, I thought I want to be able to have more time with family and be home more. I should go into distribution. Brandon, what did you go to school for? Political science. I thought I wanted to change the world through politics. I don't believe that people say when they're young, I want to be in distribution, same as they don't say I want to be in, say, market research. It just usually doesn't happen. But you land there. And I'm wondering, what did you want to do when you were younger? I spent so much time as a young kid at the we had a one screen cinema in our little town. It was called the Alhambra Theater in Pleasant Grove, Utah. And I spent a ton of time there. And they had this little bin with old movie posters that they'd kind of taken down. And I would go in like almost every day to ride my bike down. And the guy would let me take my choice of posters. What was one of your favorite movies as a youngster? Influential movies. I think I saw like Goonies like 10 times in theaters. Oh, that's that's a great answer. And what about you, Jim? Give me a movie that had a material effect on you as a youngster. I don't know the one did. I don't have a Star Wars moment like you don't know. I think we were in college and liquored up and saw Raiders of Lost Ark. And when he shoots the guy, the guy with the, you know, like that, we all we all thought that was great. But now I don't have a lot of people in our industry have a Star Wars moment, right? They saw Star Wars or something like it, and they knew what they needed to do. It's funny you say that. I don't think I had that aha moment either. But I do remember my first movie was the early modern Millie. And then I remember seeing Escape from the Planet of the Apes pretty early. But I never had like that aha moment. I remember Empire Strikes Back was very influential to me and I had not seen Star Wars yet. But still, you're right. It was more of a cumulative effect of how I felt when I went to the movies. Jim, how'd you land in distribution? Well, I know how I landed here. I wish I knew why is really what I don't know. So I was a junior in college up at Eastern Washington University and somehow got it into my head. I know what I'll do. I'm going to get in the movie business. And I had absolutely no right to think that way. Aren't you from Spokane? Outside of Spokane. Yeah. From a tiny little town outside of Spokane and Eastern's outside of Spokane as well. But anyway, I just got it in my head that I was going to do that. I had no clue as to how to do it or whatever. Graduated from Eastern was stone cold broke. So I interviewed with one company in my senior year, Del Monte, over in Seattle. As in Del Monte? Fruits and vegetables. Wow. Borrowed my roommate's suit, which I ended up ripping because I'm a little whiter than he is. I was bold enough on the application to say interested in moving to Los Angeles because I figured I had to get to L.A. So they called and they said, are you serious about moving to L.A.? I'm like, yeah, great. We'll see in June. So graduated, sold everything that wouldn't fit into my beat up Toyota Corolla and drove to L.A. Del Monte was great because it was selling fruits and vegetables and things like that to grocery stores. And it turns out I'm pretty good at sales. I found I was pretty good at talking people into doing ---- that they otherwise wouldn't do. And I was just going to say, that's part of the bravado of why I liked distribution guys. Mostly guys. There were very, very few women. There's, of course, the legendary Nikki Rocco, who came right before you did for years at Universal. She broke a glass ceiling. It was never ahead of distribution. She was it for quite a while, but realized it was good at sales. So I started like, all right, what's sales in the movie business? That must be distribution, as it turns out. So I started writing to the different heads of distribution at the studios. By that time, I'd migrated into financial services and things like that. I thought I was getting too old and making too much money. Who answered you? I made one more round of calls and literally no joke. The last call I made was to Paramount. And a guy named Terry Kierzek said, yeah, I got your resume right here. I was going to call you, so come on in. So I went in and talked to him and he offered me a job on the spot, literally making less than half of what I was making. At Del Monte? No, I was in computers and kind of financial services at that point. I'm making a decent amount of money. And so I took a flyer and went ahead and did it, figured if I didn't do it, I'd kind of always regret it. And the rest is history. Incredible. Yeah. Brandon, before we get into the enormous change, which I really want to focus most of our conversation on today, I do want to go back to show the origins of distribution. Because, folks, in the beginning of movie-dom, film-dom, distribution was a back office function. It was not sexy. It was not even known by people. I don't even think they called it distribution. I think it was just logistics or operations. All in the worst offices on the studio lots, but obviously very important. Jim, do you remember? It was the roadshow, wasn't it? Yeah, well, there were guys that literally would have prints in their cars and they would drive around. One of the people I met early on in my career down in Washington, D.C., or he was a guy named literally Harley Davidson. And back in the 30s, that's what he did. He had a car and he had prints in it and he would bicycle them around. Did he work for a studio? He did. I don't remember right now which one, but, yeah, he worked for one of the studios. So the studio would assign regions? Yeah, absolutely. And you only had so many prints to go around. Yeah, there was no wide break at that point. So, Jim, you have different people assigned to different areas of the country. Movies would stay in a theater for so long, wouldn't they? Yeah, absolutely. The lifetime multiples that we think of now. So, in other words, take the eventual domestic gross and divide it by the opening weekend. And a three is pretty good. But tens back in the day were not unusual because you would roll things out. Yeah, even within a city, by the way. But the multiple was off of what? Off of how wide you first went. That's what I mean. But it wasn't nearly as wide. 40 screens or something. Exactly. Or even 100. Seems like a long time ago. It seems like we've been doing this forever. But it's not that long ago that a 2,000 theater break was awfully wide or even 1,500. And now, of course, we can routinely, at least on some titles, get up to 4,000. That's incredible. Even after COVID and even after some theaters have closed. Is a location and a screen the same definition? No. A screen or the number of auditoriums within a theater. A theater can be a run, a location. We use all of that. So when you report to the press, it was on 3,200 theaters. Yeah, exactly. Even some of the legal wrangling can. So it might be 6,000 screens. Yeah, we had, I think off the top of my head, on disclosure day right now, we had a little over 7,500 screens and a little over 3,800 theaters. Incredible. Brandon, I want to ask you about when you first started in the business. Tell me, describe in a TV Guide version, because I don't want to hang too much on this, but what was the business like then? The distribution business like at that time? We're talking maybe 25 years ago. It was really different for me. I mean, I started a small distribution company in Salt Lake City, Utah that was doing regional leases. A guy named Jeff Simpson had started a company named Excel Entertainment. He'd worked, I think, at Disney as a creative executive and spun off and started his own company and wanted to take regional films in that area out, you know, just limitedly. Most of these faith-based? Yeah. At that time, a lot more faith-based, yeah. I remember my friend Alan Peterson worked for a company called Lucadia Films. I know he had built a strong niche in faith-based pictures, particularly Mormon-themed films. I know they thought could maybe reach audiences beyond Utah. In fact, I believe it worked. Yeah, and that's what we were doing. The first film I worked on was a film called Saints and Soldiers. It was directed by Ryan Little, and it was a regional play. And we kept expanding, expanding, and it played in festivals. And it was kind of the first one where the niche audience thought it was for them, and then the broader faith audience thought that the guy was an evangelical, it was for him. And then the World War II enthusiasts and people who'd studied history all just thought it was a broad-based war film. And so I learned a lot on that film about psychographics, yeah, and really like being able to find the market and growing. And then I talked the owner of the company into being able to get on the phone and trying to convince people to get a smaller team and get people to commit to play the movie. And my goal was to get $1,500 a theater, or I was in trouble with the budget. And I just thought it was easy because I hadn't done it before. So you basically were four-walling in a way. Yeah, it was like one theater at a time. At the time when I was starting, it was paying the theater a certain amount of money. Still the same thing, I think. But I had no marketing budget, so I had to go find congregations and World War II enthusiast groups and different groups to get motivated to motivate their people to show up to the theater. Was it not until Angel that you actually released Wide? Yeah, that was the first one. Wow, so this is going to be very interesting. Jim, what was it like in, let's say, the 90s when you started in distribution, right? Early 90s? I started very end of 87. It looks like the Wild Wild West compared to today. Quite frankly, it's so much more corporate today than it was back then. Explain that. Well, you had a lot more exhibitors than you currently do today, right? The consolidation in exhibition has been pretty dramatic over the last 30 years. Where did AMC, Regal, and Cinemar kind of take over as the top three? Somewhere in the very late 90s and right after the turn of the 2000s. So for the first 10 years, you had many more exhibitors. Oh yeah. For example, you had a lot more competitive allocations then. So in other words, you would play this theater, not that theater, because it was in close proximity. It was legal requirement. No, the legal requirements. So there's something, without boring everybody to tears, the Paramount Consent Decree existed then. We have to, and it's still the way we exist today. For example, has an AMC and right across the street is a Regal. In the parking lot. Yeah. And you can't. There wasn't that you can't. You could play them day and date. They didn't want to play day and date. In essence, you thought you were splitting grosses. The two exhibitors didn't want to play day and date. So how would you decide on who to give the movie to? Well, again, that might be relationships. It might be. Or I'll give you this one. You'll get this one. Absolutely. Allocations or even rotations, things like that, as your release schedule came along. And honestly, it's a much better way to do it now. Quite frankly, with our folks, our policy is not that we don't allocate or that we don't discern. Our policy is that we no longer honor requests for clearances. So if AMC has got a theater here and there's a theater across the street that they don't want to play with, we quite frankly, don't care on a lot of things. We may think, no, there's enough gross and there's enough one to see that we'll play them both on other things. Not so much. We only want one of those because quite frankly, we don't want to split the gross. There's only so much audience to go around. You know, at Ventura and Laurel Canyon, there are two CVSs across the street from each other. I never understood that. Like, who the hell... There's just enough foot traffic to make them both exist. I guess that's the case. Or the way you drive may dictate the CVS you want to go to because that's on my way home and then I don't have to cross traffic, et cetera, et cetera. I just found it fascinating. Starbucks had the same thing. I don't know if they still do, but it was like, there has to be some logic in that. You can find a Lowe's and a Home Depot sharing a parking lot in some places as well, too. And you can see movie theaters doing that, and that's fine, but that doesn't necessarily mean every single movie needs both runs in a given area. The most significant change, I think, which we're going to get into after the break is around windowing. So what I was trying to get to early on, and even when you were doing, Brandon, like more limited releases, are the fact that you'd have to keep the movie in the theaters for a certain number of days. What was that number? Every movie has to earn its keep when it goes into a theater. Generally speaking, though, when we put something in a theater, even certainly back when we were buying prints, and even today when we're not, we expect them to hold it clean for the first two weeks. And then after that, it's a series of arm wrestling contests over every Monday as to whether we're going to stay in or not. And that's determined on the level of gross. I mean, going in knowing that you had a pay window, and that's what I'm talking about. You were in a theater. But again, remember the theatrical window is the only window that opens and never closes. So quite frankly, as a theatrical distributor, I don't care what other windows are coming along, what other ancillary markets are coming along. If my film is grossing, and my film deserves to stay in theaters, it's going to stay in theaters regardless. You mean back in 1990, there was not a hundred and some odd day or 90 something day or 70 something day window that had to stay in the theaters? No, it's not a matter of having to stay in the theaters. What it is, is the theatrical release date, and then you'd be X number of days to home entertainment. So X number of days. So it wasn't about the theatrical. No, it's about the ancillary. You wouldn't want to pull it if it was still doing well. We wouldn't pull it anyway. Yeah, no, we wouldn't pull it anyway. What you might do is push, especially back then, you would push back some of the windows. You'd push back the home entertainment window, the DVD window, the VHS window before that, and things like that. Brandon, were you conscious of windows back 25 years ago? Yeah. How so? We were opening narrow and then we were playing in theaters for a long, long time because we didn't have big budgets. We were buying a smaller buckets of prints. Sometimes I had to choose between, should I try to do a hundred prints, but I'll have this much less marketing dollars to spend. And then we would just rotate those things and then clean the prints and then keep shuffling them around the country market by market, putting them out there. But the niches that we served were prolific at selling DVDs at the time. We were conscious of it from theaters being very... Did you kiss into that revenue? When I started, we were full distribution. So every window, we were manufacturing and... How has your relationship with marketing changed over the last 25 years? Moving from my own business to Angel Studios, it's very different. Angel was started by three brothers who had prolific marketing shops, who were launching consumer products using YouTube in the early days of YouTube, when ads were just starting to come in and they were taking like, like one of the campaigns was Squatty Potty or Poopery, or these like kind of viral videos that they would use on YouTube. And they were kind of gamifying what was happening with YouTube and YouTube starting to break out. They were understanding, Oh, I can engage with the audience. That's going to be interesting. Jim, same question. How has marketing changed from 1990 to today in terms of working with distribution? In terms of working with distribution, I think we work more together now than we probably used to. There are a lot of things that we do together. Plus in-theater marketing has always lived within distribution, but also has a foot firmly in big marketing. Can you explain what in-theater marketing is? So yeah, in-theater marketing is literally what it sounds like. Everything from the simplest stuff like putting one sheets, posters and trailers on screen and things like that, to digital promotions, to concession promotions, you name it. Now it's a very broad thing. We've got a phenomenal in-theater marketing head in Eric Carr at Universal. It just does a tremendous job with that. And it is a very busy part of the world for obvious reasons. If you were selling widgets, you'd want to know where people are buying widgets. If you're trying to put people in theaters and you want to advertise where people are in theaters. And so in-theater marketing saying everything in the name that is crucial. How much percentage wise does typically a basics, you know, the basics line item within the marketing budget get allocated to in-theater marketing? Oh, I think it depends. And I really don't even have a number for you. Yeah, it just depends. But it's increased over the years. Absolutely. Yeah. Cause it's just broadened out. We're just doing more things. Here's the latest thing. Latest thing everybody's talking about. Popcorn buckets. Who knew that that was going to be a thing, right? And now popcorn buckets are all the rage. You mean branded popcorn? Oh yeah. Just, or just people collecting and buying popcorn buckets. Collecting them too. Yeah. We have a popcorn bucket that looks like an IMAX camera coming out with the Odyssey. IMAX put it up on their merch site and it sold out in moments. Is that your idea? I wish it was. No, but I don't know whose idea it was, but it was brilliant. It is a brilliant idea. Wow. Same in terms of in theater for you? We're looking at a movie by movie basis. It feels like it's become more and more just an extension of the booking process. Do you feel the need to compete with the majors? No. For an indie studio, I just think that's a quick way to lose a lot of money. We're playing a different game in the same venue. I'm going to ask you both the same question now. We're going back to 1990. Content is king. Marketing is king. Distribution is king. What was it in 1990, Jim? Oh, it's the same thing today. It's always content. It's always the movie first. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, it's the movie. Huh. Sumner's the one that said that, by the way. He said that in the late nineties. Content is king. Sumner Redstone said that? Yeah, or at least he's taking credit for being the one that said that. And now we're going to today. You still believe content is king? I do. Yeah. I think it's about the movies. I really do. And I think there's some really interesting things going on in the market right now that kind of prove that out. It is about the movie and the audience that is available for that and wants to see it. You agree with that? I do. I think you hear every once in a while, somebody will pop up and, you know, there'll be a down week in the cinema and they'll say theatrical is dying or cinema is dying. And cinema is not dying. Theatrical is not dying. What's happening is sometimes there's just not movies that people want to go and see. And we're, we're making aspirational movies for what should audiences want instead of what do audiences want. I agree right now. You got two movies that are just showing. When there's movies that people want to go see, you can't stop them from going to see the movies and they'll show up and it'll break all the models and all the multipliers. Well, in the case of your movie Obsession, Jim, I mean, we're talking about Focus, but the master brand, if you will, of Universal. It's unbelievable. We've never seen that in recent memory. When was the last movie that increased their grosses? That often after that wide of a break, I think you have to go all the way back to something like ET. I remember Polar Express did it. Nothing to that degree. Not to that degree. No, it's so, so rare. Sound of Freedom did it, but not to that degree. Sound of Freedom did do it too. Obsession opened up in mid-May wide. They had a great opening weekend. And by the time it's done with its theatrical run, the lifetime mult on that thing is going to be over a 13, which is just insane. Absolutely. So Matt Bellany, who I was on a show last week, asked me how I thought it tested. And I said, Matt, I can't talk about individual movies, but what do you think? It had to have a great word of mouth because of that. But by the same token, Back Rooms is not the same model, and it has fallen off quite a bit after its first. So it's not as embraced as a movie like Obsession is. Would that be a fair statement? It's just the truth, yeah. Yeah, I'm just saying it didn't grow. It dropped 70 plus percent. Opened extraordinarily well. Extraordinarily well. We had a white-hot affinity group out there for it. I didn't have the legs of Obsession. Obsession, as our marketing friends would say, has got into the zeitgeist. And it's just staying there. It's not leaving. What I talk about often, and Jim sees me a lot at test screenings. I mean, we've been through literally hundreds together over our careers, is the word of mouth, the definite recommend score, always the most important score, because it has a direct correlation to the multiple, the opening weekend multiple. And that's the legs. So we're not trying to torture anyone. We're trying to get that up as high as we can so that you have the chances for greater success. And sometimes you have to be relentless. I want to just double back and say, I'm one of those people who certainly doesn't say theatrical is dead, but I also say theatrical is not coming back to where it was for various reasons. And I don't think that's a bad thing. It just is a fact. And the fact is that more people probably go to the movies, but we'll see far fewer films. So I think going back to what you both said about content, it really is incumbent upon the studios, the independents to make things that people want to leave their homes to see. That to me is important and it's incumbent upon marketing to reach them and distribution to offer the different formats for them to see. I would throw an exhibition as well. We had this conversation not too long ago. Peter Kramer can produce and find the greatest movie ever. And our production folks can just do the best job that you can, you know, greatest filmmaker and can make the just spectacular movie. Michael Moses and his team can market it like something has never been marketed before. We can put it in every theater. And if folks go into theaters and the screen's wonky and the sound doesn't work and the seats are broken and things like that, there are certain audience demos. You may not get them back in theaters in their lifetime. Is there an exhibitor who's doing an especially good job of evolving with the times? Certainly like anything else in life. There are some that do a phenomenal job and some that I'm sure could probably look to improve. It would be hard to pick one out. We love all of our friends in exhibition and enjoy the partnership that we have with all of them. When we come back, we are going to talk about what I'm really anxious to talk about, where things are today in distribution and how audiences have sort of been at the forefront of those decision-makings since audiences are now in the driver's seat. We'll be back in a moment. Listeners, the Motion Picture and Television Fund is a nonprofit charitable organization that supports working and retired members of the entertainment community. This wonderfully run organization offers assistance for living and aging with dignity and purpose in the areas of health and social services, including temporary financial assistance, case management, and residential living, and has been a crucial lifeline to thousands during and beyond critical times that our industry continues to experience. To learn more, visit mptf.com. Please join me in helping others in our industry during times of need. There are so many ways to offer support and get involved. Thank you. We are back with Brandon Purdy from Angel Studios and of course, Jim Orr, head of domestic theatrical distribution at Universal. Gents, I want to talk about today's world and how the consumer is truly now in the driver's seat. And that definitely was not the case in the nineties or aughts. It started to change when the streaming revolution came into play. Suddenly the three C's I call them were something we had to deal with and that's cost, convenience, and choice. Cost meaning, come on, what is it? At least a hundred bucks in some cities for a family of four to see a movie in a theater with the tickets, concessions, and parking. It's convenient as hell to stay home. And the choice is extraordinary at home when in the theater, it's very limited. So how has your job shifted? And you know, Jim, I'm going to go to COVID cause you broke some rules, which were great and I so admire, but I'd like to talk about how things have changed mostly for you and Brandon, I'm going to start with you cause I'd like to talk about Angel Studios and their model. You recognize something that very few had recognized. And then I want to ask Jim about what he thought when your big movie Sound of Freedom came out, probably unnerved him in some way and all the heads of the majors. Yeah. So we really focus on the audience. Like there's no executive at Angel that can green light a film. It has to be passed by the audience. Unpack that for us, please. Yeah. So we built a platform where filmmakers can submit their movies and the Angel Guild is a group of people. The Angel Guild is a group of people of how many? Right now it's 2.4 million. 2.4 million. And have they all paid money to join? Yeah. So they're able to watch all the content that we have on our platform, but also all the content that's submitted. So it's a subscription model. We like to refer to more as a membership. When you're a member of Angel and you can stream the films that we have on our platform, you also get two free tickets to every one of the movies that we put out in theaters. On top of that, you're voting for the shows. So you're coming for a film, but you're staying for the mission of kind of shaping films that you want to see in cinema. So they watch the full, either short proof of concept or the full movie. What do you call them? Torches. How'd they get that name? It's based on kind of the way that the Statue of Liberty came to be an origin that they couldn't, and I'm going to butcher the story, but they didn't have the money to do that. So they just built the torch and people could give money to be able to help see the statue be built. So the Statue of Liberty was the original crowdfunding crowdfunding. Yeah. And so you knew that, but that's what it's genius. Exactly. Yeah. And so early on at Angel, the company was evolving and growing. And there was a moment where to be able to keep the company going, the founders had to look to the audience and say, like, would you guys like to see this movement that we've started become a studio and bring on more films? So initially started with a library of, and it was a subscription model, just like, I know your mission statement has to do with putting light out into the world and creating stories that amplify light, which is a pretty wide berth. So it originally started with a library of movies, and then ultimately you brought the audience into this crowdsourcing model and that was to grow the business. And you found that audiences really were invested in wanting to have their opinions heard. Yeah. They showed up in a major way and were able to kind of launch Angel studios from that. So Angel doesn't refer to anything faith-based. It actually refers to the people who crowdfund, who put money into it, the angel investors, the people who came in. Well, Sound of Freedom wasn't exactly a faith-based movie. It was faith friendly, perhaps, but it did show light, brought your attention to an important topic of trafficking. Yeah. And so that moment, it became all about the audience. Like, how do we interact with the Angel audience and how do we continue to build that and how do we find like-minded people who are interested in the mission of what we're doing? Can you talk about that movie a little bit? Like, what did people see in that movie that was so successful? It seems like it's a very good movie. It's not an extraordinary movie, but it touched the hearts and minds of folks. Why? Yeah, it did. It just ran away. I think it was the right movie at the right time and a whole bunch of kind of building up of a powder keg over time of political stuff that was happening and just opened up and it kind of showed up quick. Like, we acquired the movie and I thought, well, we should release this movie in September that gives us enough time to prepare. And then internally, one of the founders felt like, no, it should be July 4th. Indiana Jones and Mission Impossible is coming out on that same date. And it was like three months from that date. And of course, I'm the only person in the room that had been in distribution. So I'm saying three months or July 4th, like two of the biggest film franchises, theatrical franchises, and they felt committed to it. So we went after that date. And you knew that from polling your audience? At that point, we were so new. That was only our second film that we'd ever put out theatrical. We did one film before that theatrical, and I had sold my business and started just in February of that year, building Angels. What was the first one? It was his only son. It was a biblical film. It was made for like $250,000, over $12 million. It was made for $250,000. So that gave him confidence. And how much was Sound of Freedom made for? They've never given us a firm production budget. Well, it wasn't that much though. But no, it was $15 or $20 million. Tell us about the Pay It Forward model. Yeah. So Pay It Forward actually had started early with Angel in their early days of streaming, meaning that they had a hit show that they had originated. It was called The Chosen. And they were trying to figure out how to get people to watch it. And I think one of the founders had had a neighbor. He was letting watch the show and he realized people weren't watching it because they didn't want to spend the money to watch the show. And so he let them watch it for free. And then it started to spread and he watched it like in his neighborhood. You know, they're new in entertainment and innovative. And they said, what if we just made the show free? And there's a call to action at the end where if you want to help other people be able to watch the show, Pay It Forward for this many people to watch it. So then when we went into theatrical, I got a call. We build all of our own tech internally. Like half of our company's engineers. There's a lot of engineers at Angel. And so I got a call from one of the engineers like, yeah, I think we figured out how to do Pay It Forward in the cinema. Do you think we should give it a shot? And I said, yeah, yeah, go for it. So like the next day on a Sunday, they rented out an auditorium and they were playing around with scanning QR codes and seeing if they could get, you know, people could pay it forward from the theater. So his only son, they went out and it was successful, but that movie didn't break out like Sound of Freedom. And Sound of Freedom was really from what that movie was about. And it being such a current issue that we're facing now. And so we recorded Jim Caviezel giving a call to action at the end of the movie and put it on and over $20 million paid forward for people to go see the movie. So the people are paying it forward and the tickets are coming into a bucket. Like if you just imagine a bucket, they're filling up. And then we're also running a campaign to make sure that people can get the tickets and use them. And so all that money. You become like a fulfillment center in a way. Yeah. We were doing like a wait list because sometimes there wouldn't be any Pay It Forward tickets left. You know, people had gone and seen it. And so people would get on a wait list and other people would pay it forward. It was like the smart version of, remember that company MoviePass. That certainly had its challenges, but it did teach us that people really wanted to see movies. I'll tell you that. That price does have something to do with it. But it enabled Sound of Freedom to really be seen by anybody who wanted to see it and globally. How do you feel about the studios? Do they intimidate you as a small player? No, I mean, I came up from the cinema, so I admire them. Do you find them trying to ever intimidate you? No, not at all. I really just feel like there's enough. I think you at Angel have done such an incredible job of, I'm looking at a little movie here I worked on called Cabrini, which is behind you right now. Mother Cabrini. It's a terrific picture and there's no way a studio would ever release that or could release it because they have certain overhead they have to make and projections they have to run. So you believe there's room for everyone. Jim, on the studio side, do you think people underestimated Angel? Personally, I think more movies that excite more people to get into more theaters is just simply a good thing. Full stop. Yeah. Like when I see obsession happening, I like to be in the cinema to watch movies. I see multiple movies a week, but I'm just as excited when I see a movie break out as when it's a movie that I'm working on, because it just means the cinema is thriving and more options and more audiences. And especially when it's bringing young people to the cinema. I mean, I really believe that this is like multi-generational nostalgia. It drives a lot of audience going. And so when people see trailers for more movies, they come back to the cinema. I'm celebrating any time a movie's winning, wherever it's coming from. I think that more good movies beget more good movies and success begets success. It's just how it works. Jim, the pandemic was an incredibly scary time for all of us. I mean, my God. I remember Warners, for example, having to make some very tough decisions. Anne Sarnoff was a guest on my podcast and we talked about that. I don't know if you ever caught that one, but it was a really hard time where they had to make some big decisions that pissed a lot of people off, but I also understand why they had to do things at that time. You were one of the first guys, Jim, to create, I believe the 17 day window. Can you tell us about that and what was going through your mind at that time? The audiences, generally speaking, can be pretty different for something that is a premium transactional model versus a theatrical model. And the world was certainly in a different place in 2021 and even early 22 than it is today. And so when we went to exhibition with this idea, what we promised them was at least 17 days, at least 17 days of theatrical exclusivity, meaning it would not be on a premium market prior to that. And the reason you chose 17 was three weekends? Yeah. 17 is also not arbitrary because it's through the third Sunday and basically through the third Sunday or 17 days of theatrical exclusivity is roughly on almost any film, anywhere from 70 to 80 something percent. You just took my question. So it's beautiful. So about 75% of every movie ish happens within 17 days. 17 days. Yeah. That's how front load of the businesses we were discussing earlier, how it wasn't that way prior certainly is today. How much of percentage is in 30 days or 31 days? By the time you get to that, you're in the nineties. Okay. Then why is there a debate on windowing? Well, I think there's still a very valid debate and we've actually now extended our. I know you have. That's why I'm asking. Yeah. I think what you don't want to do necessarily is train audiences to simply wait. But the other thing to keep in mind is there's a dramatic difference between a PVOD model and an SVOD model. If you are 17 days to subscription streaming, that's dramatically different than 17 days to a high price transactional model. So listen, the industry is, it's always been the case for the last 30 something years that we've been dealing with windows are constantly going to be moving. We feel very good about the decision that we've made to extend that. What is your current currently in 26? We're at least 32 and going to 45 in essence in 27 and beyond. And again, by that point, I don't think you're training the audiences to stay home. You've certainly given every film a great opportunity to leg out theatrically. And by the way, they're also not carved in stone. The naysayers would say, and I'm one of them, that you can't train an audience. Like you're not going to do that. The audiences, because they're in the driver's seat, I think know what they want to see in a theater and what they don't. Jim, you'll remember this. I remember X-Men, this was pre COVID, was pirated and it got out online. Do you remember that? I do. And it was scarier than ----. Like we were all panicked because it got out and they thought it was going to really cut into the box office since of course it didn't. I mean, we'll never know if it did, but for all intents and purposes, it was a huge opening and it didn't seem like it affected it a whit. And so I think people did not want to see that movie that they were anticipating with shitty sound and shitty color and so forth. They wanted to see it in a theater. And I think that's where I believe in the audience. I think differently than a lot of people in the industry. I just don't buy that. We're going to condition people to do that. If people want to see back rooms, they're going opening weekend and they're not going to wait to see it online. I don't believe. No, first of all, it's a completely different product, right? The thing that we're talking about, the movie itself is engineered from the ground up to be seen on a 40 foot screen with the amazing Atmos surround and everything else like that, that you got going on. Let's call it the best possible. Best possible, yeah. And it's a true experience, right? And that's how you want to experience these movies. That's how you really want to consume. There are some folks that don't go into theaters at all. It's just not what they do. And that's perfectly fine. Our job is distributor and marketers and producers to make a phenomenal movie that excites them and market it and get it in front of them and drag them into the theaters and have them have a wonderful time. And so they come back and see something else. People often ask me who my favorite studio is. And just like your friends, I don't answer that question because I have so many friends and there's so many great studios at different times. It's cyclical, but I have to say Universal just has a terrific process led by, of course, Donna Langley and Peter Kramer and Michael Moses and you, Jim. And there's others that are just terrific at what you all do, but you also seem to take a bit more risk than some others, which I appreciate. And that means something. Thank you. I appreciate that. That was very kind. I certainly hope so. I hope we do. Donna has absolutely created a culture that I think encourages risk-taking, encourages people to speak up and to be bold and things like that. But I want to just jump in on Wicked, for example. I mean, Wicked was a huge risk. Yeah. People don't understand that. That was not just, oh, because now it's successful. Well, first of all, it was big to begin with just as Wicked, whether it was going to be one movie and, you know, whatever. And so everybody held hands on that. And then we all held hands again when it was decided to make it two movies. And it was absolutely the right decision. Mark Platt and John Chu's vision was a hundred percent spot on. And of course their execution was absolutely amazing. They put together a cast. Do you remember that first screening, Jim? I do. In Arizona, that one. And then we did that other one in Arizona and it even scored better. It was like, what the hell? And it was just, I remember feeling a sense of reverence for Donna. And obviously Mark had this great property and John knocked it out of the park, but it had to take a real set of, you know what, to have done that multi, multi millions of dollar commitment. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We all held hands and said, yeah, absolutely. That's, it's the right thing to do. And again, John and Ari and Cynthia and Jonathan, their execution was just flawless. One of the other great things you all did was putting Chris Meledandri into Illumination and partnering in that enterprise. I think it's been your single most important investment you ever made. And also Jason Blum, the relationship with Blumhouse has been another great boon for you guys. The relationships that we have with Illumination is just phenomenal. Same with Jason and Blumhouse as well. It's just, they want to be at Universal. I think a lot of filmmakers want to be at Universal. They want to work with Donna. I would like to think that they see a culture here that is something that they want to be a part of. Couldn't be more proud of that. I was going to say, what was one of your proudest professional moments at Universal? Hard to single it out, but I'll tell you what. It's a film that ended up winning best picture, probably, when it comes to mind. Now, actually, interestingly enough, not, although that was phenomenal, getting to work with Chris and Emma for the first time there, but that was actually Green Book. Jim Burke is, Jim Burke, the producer of it's a friend of mine. We worked together at Focus. Peter Farrelly, the director. And I had some interesting conversations and it was one where we were talking earlier about, you don't necessarily go wide all the time. That was one where less was more. We decided to go on a more limited break. We went on with about a thousand theaters. Why did you make that decision? Here's what we found out, and we have the greatest marketing engine in this industry. It's not arguable. I mean that very sincerely. Malcolm Moses and his team are as good as it gets, bar none. As good as they are, marketing Green Book was not the easiest thing in the world. It's two old guys driving around in a car in the South in the sixties, right? But 100% of the people that saw it loved it. I mean, literally loved it. I know I worked on it. I remember it was one of the highest testing movies we had ever done. So the theory is this. I used 42nd street as an example when we all talked about it, which was we could open up both Ewok and the empire. They literally face each other across 42nd street and we'd have two $5,000 grosses that are both about the bottom of the building, right? Cause it's not going to open fantastic necessarily. And no matter how good the word of mouth is, physics is going to take over. There's more film coming in. They're going to go, or we open up one of those two runs. We have a $10,000 gross that's about in the middle of the building. And now we have room to sit there and we can sit there and we can sit there and we can sit there and we decided to do that across all of North America. And so talk to participant and CA, we all agreed, Michael and everybody. And so we did that. And that's exactly what happened. It opened up. Okay. But it didn't drop. And it just sat there and sat there and sat there. And as we've got awards, as we've got other indications, we'd put our foot on the gas and go broader. And next thing you know, we've got about 34 million at the end of the year. It goes to 83 some million. And you see a friend of yours up there accepting the Oscar for best picture. It was pretty, it was pretty cool. That's a great story. I also want to mention that Borat did that. I remember Sasha Baron Cohen and I recently talked about it. We were reminiscing about some of the older films that he had done and that Fox had distributed that in, I think it was only like a thousand screens or something, or 800 screens, something along those lines, it was not very wide. And the movie did gangbusters. The word of mouth on it was so unbelievably great. It grew that second weekend and beyond. So it was actually a brilliant strategy. It was a movie that needed to be discovered and like green book. Yes. We all discussed it and seemed like the right thing to do. And it turned out to be just great. That's just great. Brandon, what are you most proud of in your career so far? Being a part of sound of freedom was pretty amazing. That had to be a head trip week after week after week is our second movie out as a studio releasing the film. But then, you know, for my whole entire career of working with audiences and figuring out niche audiences and micro transactions with smaller audiences and working film by film by film and kind of doing a volume play, then to be an angel. Building this audience driven thing that angel had already largely built and adding theatrical to it. And then to have that film just take off. I'm sure Jim's experienced this a lot, but you know, to just feel like you couldn't have stopped that movie if you didn't try it, you know, like at some point it just went and it just hit a moment and it was exciting. That was just great. Yeah. Jim, you must, on some weekends, love the either late Thursday night calls or early Friday morning calls, certainly the Saturday morning calls, and sometimes you must dread them. Fair play? Yes, that is 100% an accurate, an accurate assessment. Do you pick up the phone and call the senior leadership at uni? Yeah. It's more emails than anything. Yeah, absolutely. I bet it's a phone call when it's really good and an email. Actually, sometimes it's a phone call when it's looking like it's not going to be so good either. But yeah, it just depends. But yeah, we try to be very communicative to the filmmakers and to the senior staff to let them know exactly where we think we're headed, even before we open. And then certainly communicate over the opening weekend and weekends and weeks to let them know what's working and where we think we're going to be. I have to say that most heads of studios, every one of them that I know, come in and they're onto the next thing Monday, good, bad, or otherwise. And I think that's very healthy because they know that everyone has done their very, very best, their damndest to get this out. And nobody makes decisions in vacuums. Would that be fair? No, 100%. Yeah. Comment? Listen, the business we've been discussing here is a very, very hard thing to do. People like Donald Langley and Peter Kramer are looking at black ink on white paper and deciding to make very big bets. Are you in those green light committees? Yeah, absolutely. And I'm very grateful that they let me read the scripts and, you know, have a small voice here and there. But really that's the job of Donna and Peter and people like that. From a distribution standpoint, what keeps you up at night? What keeps me up at night? I'm not sure there's too much that keeps me up at night. We just want to simply win all the time. And so, and I might be slightly more competitive than most people perhaps. So that, you know, we just want to do the very best with every single one of our films. We want to just make sure we have just exploited it in every way possible and made the filmmakers feel like they're really getting the very best service that they possibly can get. What happens in five years from now with Angel and the business? We keep growing and keep fighting. What does keep growing mean? Continuing to build the guild, the Angel guild, the people who are voting. Convert torches to movies. Yeah. And then just really relying on community, like building this community of people who are interested in what we're building. Building the 2 million to 4 million? Yeah. I mean, just continuing to grow and then continuing to build a community of filmmakers who are interested in what we're doing and telling stories that are amplifying light and continuing to grow that. Always built around the theatrical. I mean, that's super important to Angel Studios and to what we're building is the theatrical experience. Cause that's not only for the Angel guild where that's the communal experience where people are coming together and kind of meeting each other and having that theatrical experience that's super important that really fuels the rest of the work that we're doing. But I mean, we're, you know, we're three years into theatrical. What are your biggest threats? What's nipping at your heels? What makes you nervous? I mean, I think we're mostly focused on opportunity and success, you know, just looking forward and building. But I mean, I think always human apathy is the biggest threat to everything in theatrical. But your audience is giving their opinions constantly. So it's not like it's going to just come up on you, you know, you know where things are heading. And we're a data driven company. Angel started as a tech company and as a data company. So, I mean, we're looking at stuff all the time. Like I came in the day after sound of freedom, open it, open on a Monday. So I came in the following, I opened a movie on a Monday, like the early showings, July 4th was on a, but I remember coming in and thinking that we're going to be celebrating this. Major win. And I walked in and everybody, you would have thought we didn't win. I mean, because everybody was in conference rooms working and trying to figure things out. That's what I'm saying. Then it was onto the next fire or hopefully the next success. And honestly, I was in meetings where they're like, we probably could have done more. Probably could have made more. How do we done this? And how have we done that? And there's solving it. Can't audiences also invest in your movies? Can't your guild members early on? That was more of the model now. Not so much now it's more voting and deciding kind of what is, you'll actually not make a movie because the audience is not digging it. Well, I mean, we've had movies and I wouldn't say names because we want to be fair to filmmakers. But you know, we've had films from sizable filmmakers with sizable casts that executive team's excited about and the team's excited about that goes in and it doesn't score high enough. It doesn't score well enough and we don't release it. Do you do torches on those movies too? Well, some come in as torches, some come in as finished films. I see. And you'll show the finished film to a subset of your folks. Yeah. But it's high security. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. How many people, for example, will look at a film? Just until it gets to statistical significance. Once we feel like the data is there and the voting, they get asked two questions. Does this story amplify light? And how disappointed would you be if this movie was never made or never released in the theater? You don't say, would you recommend it or would you see it or anything like that? Wow. So are we on brand? Yeah. And then how disappointed would you be if this movie was never made or never released? And those two metrics give you your answers. Fascinating. Jim, last question here. Where are we in five years with distribution? What do you see changing most? Domestically, there will probably be fewer theaters. To the tune of what? Consolidation. 10% to 15%. That's my theory as well. Smaller towns to begin with, or smaller venues in very expensive parts of the world. So for example, like the little town I grew up in, that theater was gone decades ago. There's just a population. You mean those are the ones that will probably see that. Or if you've got a small theater that is in a very high priced market or things like that, you're going to get squeezed out there as well. We're already seeing some of that. I think there'll be even more better PLF screens, premium large format screens, whether they be IMAX or Dolby or Exhibitor branded. I think there'll be more experiential things in theaters like the 40X and the environmental screens, the ScreenX, D-Box and stuff like that. You mean so you can feel as though you're there. They're there. Yeah. And then the other thing that seems to be growing that I don't think is going to stop are entertainment centers. So a theater as a part of a larger entertainment could not agree with you more. Bowling restaurants, you name it. A destination. In essence, replacing the mall from back in the day. You're going to bid on IMAX? I don't make that kind of money. Because it's such an important part of our business. Those big screens. You guys are terrific. I so enjoyed having you both here. Brandon, thank you so much. Jim, you're like mishpacha, you know, we go back so long. Jim's like, I don't know what that means. Sounded good. It means family. Thanks for having us. Yeah. Thank you. Absolutely. Thanks guys. To our listeners. I hope you enjoyed this conversation for more insights into filmmaking, audience testing, and the business of Hollywood. I invite you to check out my books, audience ology, and how to score in Hollywood at Amazon or through my website at Kevin gets three 60.com. You can also follow me on my social media next time on don't kill the messenger. I'll be joined by the prolific producer and industry visionary, Roy Lee. Until then I'm Kevin gets, and to you, our listeners, I appreciate you being part of the moviemaking process. Your opinions matter.