Angel Studios receives $47M investment to 'remake' Hollywood
Angel Studios, the distribution company behind the record-breaking series “The Chosen,” has garnered nearly $50 million in investments to help transform the entertainment industry.
In hopes of bringing control of the entertainment industry back to consumers and creators, Gigafund, the venture capital firm behind Elon Musk's company SpaceX, has led in the financing of this ambitious venture.
Neal and Jeffrey Harmon, founders of Angel Studios, have seen over $100 million in annual revenue in just one year after Disney and Warner Bros. hit the brothers with a copyright infringement lawsuit over their entertainment platform, VidAngel. Launched in 2013, VidAngel was created to help families filter out language, nudity, violence and other content from movies and TV series.
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Gigafund invested the largest amount of money in Angel Studios' latest venture. Others helping to support Angels Studios are original seed investors Alta Ventures and Kickstart Fund, while $5 million came directly from Angel Studios fans. These entities believe the distribution company is transforming the entertainment industry.
CEO Neal Harmon is at the helm of this next season as Angel gears up to distribute 300 titles. Everything produced over the next few years promises to be of the same quality as “The Chosen."
“Angel Studios helps creators build a direct relationship with their fans and produce meaningful and compelling content for hundreds of millions of people who have been underserved by the entertainment industry,” managing partner of Gigafund, Stephen Oskoui, said in a statement shared with The Christian Post. “We believe that Angel is on track to rewrite the rules of the media business and have a significant impact on culture.”
According to its description, Angel Studios is a “community-driven movie studio that empowers audiences to decide what content gets produced and distributed while creating communities around each project.” The Angel platform allows for creators to pitch content and “Angel investors” will jump on and support the ones they are most excited to see.
As seen from the success of their projects — “The Chosen” has been viewed over 300 million times to date and “Dry Bar Comedy” receives 1 billion views a year — once the credited content is funded and complete, the viewers help it go viral as fans share it with others.
“On Angel’s community and streaming platform, artists answer to audiences, not to a Hollywood studio,” Harmon shared in the statement. “As our creators invert Hollywood’s abysmal 80 percent failure rate, audiences will win.”
“This raise gives us more than funding; it gives us key strategic partners,” added Harmon. “Gigafund and Uncorrelated will help us realize our long-term mission of remaking the entertainment industry and freeing both creators and their fans to enjoy the content that they find most important.”
Angel is looking to go head to head with the $280 billion Hollywood industry, which is almost totally controlled by five major studios. With this latest funding round, the studio "plans to continue improving its streaming platform, market to new audiences, and develop its content pipeline for 2022 and beyond," it said.
Jeannie Ortega Law is a reporter for The Christian Post. Reach her at: jeannie.law@christianpost.com She's also the author of the book, What Is Happening to Me? How to Defeat Your Unseen Enemy Follow her on Twitter: @jlawcp Facebook: JeannieOMusic
