As ‘Young Washington’ Nears Release, Angel Studios CEO Neal Harmon Addresses Movie Theater Push

EXCLUSIVE: Angel Studios, the self-described “values-based,” audience-backed company known for releasing left-field 2023 blockbuster Sound of Freedom, is marking a new chapter with its first festival world premiere. Young Washington, a narrative look at the American president’s origins starring Ben Kingsley, Mary-Louise Parker, Kelsey Grammer and Andy Serkis, will debut Saturday at the Tribeca Festival in New York.

Neal Harmon, CEO of Angel, tells Deadline the film is “America’s first coming-of-age story,” depicting the founding father as “a young man learning hard lessons about leadership, resilience, and responsibility.” Launching at Tribeca, ahead of a wide release on July 3, will help “bring this film to the global stage.”

In an interview with Deadline, Harmon addressed not only Young Washington but the slate of 10 other titles Angel will release theatrically in 2026. He also addresses the company’s bumps and stock price swoon since its initial public offering last fall, as well as charges from some critics that the company has forsaken its mission amid a rancorous parting with The Chosen creator Dallas Jenkins.

The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

DEADLINE: Will Young Washington take the company into a new area? How is it furthering the strategy and the mission of Angel? 

NEAL HARMON:  There’s a number of great things about this film. It’s a genre – war epic – we haven’t done before. We’ve got Golden Globe winners Kelsey Grammar and Mary-Louise Parker, and Academy Award winner Ben Kingsley in the film, which between the genre and those actors, gives us a whole new audience that we can tap into. This is also a big year for our country, it’s a celebratory year, and so it’s going to be front of mind this Fourth of July for people.

DEADLINE: Your audience plays a prominent role through the Angel Guild, which has almost 2.4 million members. It gives you visibility on projects from the earliest development stage to release. What has the guild process revealed about Young Washington? How do you expect it to play?

HARMON: It has a guild score of 90, which is a great guild score for a war film. The Rotten Tomato score is highly correlated with the guild score, generally speaking. And so we know that the audience is going to come out of the films, like 9 out of 10 times, feeling happy with the experience, and moved by the experience. That’s always good that you know what the word of mouth will be like on the other side. And the question for us is going to be, as we scale up our pre-sales, how big we can make this opening release. We’re we’re tracking ahead of the majority of our films right now. We were at 109,000 tickets pre-sold at just about a month out, which is excellent. But we learn a lot in these last weeks leading up to the opening. And so, we’re optimistic about the opening. 

DEADLINE: Angel has a pretty ambitious theatrical plan, with 10 releases on its 2026 slate. The overall box office has been resurgent, but it’s still a volatile business and very difficult to rationalize as many, many companies have learned the hard way. Why are you so committed to theatrical?

HARMON: If you want to see a whale, don’t go to an aquarium. The biggest opportunity, the most respected filmmakers, they want to play in the ocean. They don’t want to play in some locked-in aquarium, and the theatrical world forces everyone to deal with public scrutiny on a level that streaming platforms and other things don’t provide. In addition to that, our guild members, they find great value in having an impact on the film industry. And so when they see the titles that they voted for, the titles that they got behind, that they helped to fund to get to market, show up on marquees in their towns, it’s very motivating. It’s very community-driven. And it’s a chance for a community to come together. In fact, we’re releasing a brand new feature in the guild that is directed just to these releases. That is when you’re signing up on the website, you can actually, as you’re checking out with tickets, you can actually see guild logos. It’s a shield. It’s a gold shield. If you’re a guild member, you can go get seats next to another guild member and introduce yourself to them. It’s very community oriented feature that has strengthened the community and the conversion rate of of tickets for new ticket purchasers and for guild numbers. We’re also aware that the MPA hasn’t been perfect for our community on identifying what, like, what’s age appropriate. And so we launched a feature and a whole community discussion board, a route where people can engage. The community can engage and decide what they think the right age is for a film. And, for example, [Kevin James romantic comedy] Solo Mio got a PG rating. Uh, the guild said it was a 13-plus film. Not necessarily for any reason, except perhaps it’s because it’s a romantic comedy, and, you know, kids that are younger than 13 aren’t really into romantic comedies as much. The last thing I’d say about theatrical is that one of the hottest things right now are ‘in real life’ experiences. Gen Z, according to Cinema United, is the fastest-growing largest cinema-going population. And according to the CMO of IMAX, she said Gen Alpha is their biggest demographic. So, you know, and I’ve seen this in my own kids who like to buy vinyl records and they like to do things physically because they’re hungry for physical experiences and and experiences of connection, almost almost like a pendulum swinging away from all this tech and AI culture. The strongest brands have some sort of physical in-person experience and angels building a community based one. 

DEADLINE: Is there a financial benefit you’re seeing from putting movies in theaters?

HARMON: There are many films that we wouldn’t have signed this year if we didn’t have a theatrical offering. Filmmakers wouldn’t have come to us. They would have gone elsewhere. We wouldn’t have gotten the level of talent. We wouldn’t have gotten the level of production, and we wouldn’t have the downstream and distribution rights for these films if we didn’t have a theatrical offering. So, If you think about it as complimentary to what we’re building, which we’re building a community, that’s what Angel is about. The engine of Angel is the Angel Guild, and that is the business of angel, but what do guild members want? They want authentic, true, noble, just. They want all these principles in their media and they want it to be excellent. And like I said, if you want to see the most beautiful creatures, you go to the ocean. And that’s the theatrical market. And it is costly and it is very expensive. And very risky. But Angel has built a platform where we reduce that risk systematically. So that we get the benefits of theatrical and a plane in that space without the downside as a business. So what are the benefits? We get actors, films, and intellectual property we’d never be able to get if we weren’t playing in that space.  Another benefit is, if you look at our top 10 highest-performing movies on the streaming platform right now. Half of them are our most recent theatrical releases.

DEADLINE: Angel has parted ways with Dallas Jenkins, the creator of one of your most popular series, The Chosen. In a recent New Yorker article about the series, faith-based marketing consultant Ash Grayson said Angel, in his view, has strayed from its original mission and become “too Hollywood.” What is your response to that?

HARMON: The guild approves every title that comes to Angel. If I want something to come to Angel, I can’t bring it here without their sign-off. We’ve given the guild the keys and they get to decide what comes through the door. It’s been built into the DNA of Angel. And we think that the that the growth of Angel actually is a testament to that. We’ve now paid out over a quarter of a billion dollars in filmmaker earnings as of the end of the last quarter. And that number just keeps growing exponentially. Our average guild member is paying $13.69 per month. That’s a revenue rate of over $390 million. It’s almost four times our best year of The Chosen. So, I think people vote with their values and their wallets, and they’re clearly voting for the Angel Guild. 

DEADLINE: Last fall, Angel became a publicly traded company. I think it’s fair to say Wall Street hasn’t quite known what to do with Angel. Since the IPO, your market value has fallen from $1.6 billion to about $530 million. What do you feel is being undervalued about your story?

HARMON: I love that question. The Street doesn’t understand that Angel is driven by a community to its core, and that community has lots of power, and it’s not just power in that they get, they have, hold the keys to the library. But there are network effects that are happening that the Street doesn’t yet understand. And the Street in the past has measured and and and given multiples to companies that are community based, that are much, much higher than what the way that they’re measuring Angel today. So you look at Reddit, you look at Roblox, two very community-based applications, and you see multiples that reflect the power of a community and what, what kind of, because community builds large barriers to entry and creates lots of opportunities for value creation for stockholders. And the Street is probably looking at it somewhere around like a Netflix comparison or, you know, maybe a Lionsgate or some of these other players in the space. And they’ll figure it out over time. But meanwhile, we’ll just continue to build the community, build value, and we think that over time that the stock will reflect the value that we’re building. 

DEADLINE: What have you learned in running a public company?

HARMON: The public markets. In New York and the financial markets, the way that they’re built is breathtaking. And they’re also brutal. And unforgiving. But they’re built on one thing, which first and foremost is trust. When the markets begin to trust the model, the business, the management team, that trust can go a long way. Angel’s going to be bold in the kinds of moves and decisions that we make and the markets like they like things to be like, you give us a projection, you slightly beat the projection, you do that quarter after quarter, and then we know we can trust you. When we went public, I didn’t fully appreciate how slight surprises can affect things. We bought [animated series] David last year along with 2521 Entertainment, and the markets weren’t expecting it. And our lender required us to replace the David capital. I didn’t appreciate how the markets would respond to those kinds of decisions. Now, I do. And that’s OK. But we’ve got ourselves in a position where we can grow within our own means, and, um, as long as we’re growing healthily within our means, how the markets treat us, we can be patient about it, we don’t have to be obsessed or distracted by it. But it’s still important to the mission.