“Sound of Freedom” is the film that the chattering classes are encouraging you not to see. NPR says its success is due to support from the shadowy QAnon extremist group. It’s been blasted by The Guardian as “QAnon adjacent” and was linked to blood libels and conspiracy theories by a JTA article. A CNN segment labeled it as a crude and fraudulent piece of agitprop that is the product of a “moral panic.” It’s the kind of movie that enlightened and educated people are supposed to avoid at all costs.
And yet, somehow in this season of Hollywood blockbusters, it is “Sound of Freedom”—a movie shot on a slim budget five years ago and distributed by a fledgling independent studio that is largely associated with marginal religious content—that is the surprise runaway hit of the summer. Describing the exploits of real-life former Homeland Security Department agent Tim Ballard in combating the sexual trafficking of children, it sold $148 million in tickets at theaters since its release on July 4. That put it in third place during the month in box-office receipts, trailing only the massively promoted “Barbie” ($351 million) and “Oppenheimer” ($174 million), and actually soundly beating two other major studio releases—the latest editions of the “Mission Impossible” and “Indiana Jones” franchises, despite being shown on fewer screens than all of those films.
