Inspirational pop duo For King + Country has already conquered the music industry, becoming one of the most influential forces in contemporary Christian music with six studio albums, massive tours, and an armload of awards, including four Grammys. However, they’re only just getting started in taking their talents to film. Two years ago, they found massive success telling their family’s story in the musical biopic Unsung Hero, which marked Joel David Smallbone‘s directorial debut and earned a solid $21.1 million at the box office on a $6 million budget. Now, they’re returning to theaters in a similarly personal film with a little help from their filmmaker brother, Ben Smallbone.
Premiering this Friday, November 6, Drummer Boy sends the Smallbones back to the beginning of the American Revolution to tell a hopeful story unfolding in the battle for independence. At the center of it all are two brothers, Benjamin (Lucas Leach) and Jeremiah Clem (Joel David Smallbone), on separate sides of the conflict, one believing in their father’s promise of America and the other declaring it a lie and vowing to stand with king and country. Also caught in the crossfire is an enslaved woman, who finds love with Benjamin as they seek freedom from a world that refuses to give it to them. The story was built to tie into the themes of For King + Country’s music, focusing on love, family, forgiveness, and sacrifice, and filled with hopeful, soaring tunes along the way. To set the stage for such a tale, however, tragedy must come first.
Collider can exclusively share a sneak peek at Drummer Boy that teases the pivotal moment that charts a painful course for the Clem family. It takes place on a British vessel, where the children and their mother hide while their father, played by Ioan Gruffudd, commands his men during a French attack. It doesn’t take long for the enemy to start boarding the ship, beginning a frantic battle of swords and gunfire that grows increasingly desperate. Things go from bad to worse when young Ben runs onto the deck of the ship to find his father, sending Jeremiah running to save him before he gets hurt in the skirmish. Disaster soon strikes as the children bear witness to their dad being gunned down and, in the chaos, the ship’s mast collapses and is poised to crush Ben’s leg before the shot cuts away.
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Collider · Best Picture Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Five winners · ten questions · one envelope
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be and what it can do to you. One of them is the film made for the way your mind works, and ten questions will work out which. The nominees
2020Parasite
2023Everything Everywhere All at Once
2024Oppenheimer
2015Birdman
2008No Country for Old Men
Question 01 of 10TONE
01 What kind of film experience are you really after? The best movies do not just entertain. They leave something behind.
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Question 02 of 10THEME
02 Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What is yours?
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Question 03 of 10STRUCTURE
03 How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
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Question 04 of 10VILLAIN
04 What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
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Question 05 of 10ENDING
05 What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
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Question 06 of 10WORLD
06 Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything: mood, stakes, what is even possible.
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Question 07 of 10CRAFT
07 What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature, the element that makes it unmistakable.
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Question 08 of 10PROTAGONIST
08 What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you follow says something about you.
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Question 09 of 10PACE
09 How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint. Others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
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Question 10 of 10AFTERMATH
10 What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
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The envelope, pleaseAnd the Oscar goes to
★ Best Picture, 2020 Parasite Bong Joon-ho, 2019 A film that hides its true intentions until the moment it is ready to reveal them.
You are drawn to films that operate on several levels at once, that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image. From the Collider file
The first film not in the English language to win Best Picture, in the Academy’s
92-year history to that point.
It took four Oscars in one night: Picture, Director, Original Screenplay and International
Feature.
It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2019 by a unanimous jury vote, the first Korean film
to do so.
The Park family’s modernist house was not a location. It was built from scratch on an
outdoor lot.
Reads between the lines Loves a reveal Attention to detail
★ Best Picture, 2023 Everything Everywhere All at Once Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, 2022 A film that refuses to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful.
You want it all, and this one gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is among the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse science fiction, family drama, existential crisis, and an emotional core that sneaks up on you in the middle of the chaos. You respond to ambition. Being overwhelmed is the design, not the side effect, because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what the film is about. From the Collider file
Seven Oscars, including three acting wins for Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan and Jamie Lee
Curtis.
Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian woman to win Best Actress.
The visual effects were handled by a team of fewer than ten people, most of them
self-taught.
Ke Huy Quan had all but left acting for two decades before this role brought him back.
Wants everything Big swings Soft center
★ Best Picture, 2024 Oppenheimer Christopher Nolan, 2023 A film about the gap between what we can do and what we should do.
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale, films that treat history not as a backdrop but as a force, then place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer sits inside one of the most consequential moments in human history and refuses to look away from it. You want your films to feel important without being self-important, earning their ambition through craft and the gravity of the subject. This one is enormous, complicated, and offers no easy comfort. From the Collider file
Seven Oscars, including Nolan’s first wins for directing and for Best Picture.
Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. both took their first Academy Awards for it.
Kodak engineered a black-and-white 65mm stock that did not previously exist so Nolan could
shoot those sequences on IMAX.
A three-hour, R-rated drama about theoretical physics that passed 950 million dollars
worldwide.
Thinks in decades Scale and weight No easy comfort
★ Best Picture, 2015 Birdman Alejandro G. Iñárritu, 2014 A film doing something that probably should not be possible.
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction, where the how of the filmmaking becomes part of the what it is about. Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman, stitched to appear as one continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera make something unlike anything else: a film about creativity, relevance, self-destruction and never quite knowing whether your work means anything at all. From the Collider file
Four Oscars, among them Best Picture and Best Director for Iñárritu.
Emmanuel Lubezki’s win here was the middle of three consecutive cinematography Oscars,
after Gravity and before The Revenant.
Antonio Sánchez’s improvised drum score was ruled ineligible for the score category,
which caused a minor uproar.
The long-take illusion was built from a handful of extended shots joined by hidden cuts.
Formally daring Camera as character Ego and art
★ Best Picture, 2008 No Country for Old Men Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007 A film that treats dread as a form of meaning.
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, refuses to explain itself, and lets unease do the talking. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is about the arrival of a new kind of evil: implacable, arbitrary, and indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of things. It is one of the most tightly controlled films ever made, and that control is the source of the terror. You want your films to haunt you rather than comfort you, and you have no interest in a resolution that would be a lie. From the Collider file
Four Oscars: Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, and Supporting Actor for Javier Bardem.
Adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel, with much of his dialogue carried over
intact.
Carter Burwell’s score runs about sixteen minutes and is nearly inaudible by design.
Roger Deakins was nominated twice that year, for this and The Assassination of Jesse James,
and won for neither.
Trusts silence Dread over answers No tidy endings
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‘Drummer Boy’ Was Inspired By the Smallbones’ Own Familial Conflict
Filling out the remaining cast of the Smallbones’ Revolutionary War epic are India Brown, Melora Hardin, Beth Easdown, Beverley Knight, Charles Esten, and Iain Glen. Ben and Joel David Smallbone co-directed the feature from a script by Richard L. Ramsey, while Luke Smallbone joined them as producers alongside Chip Diggins, Kristy Choo, and Justin Tolley. Joel and Ben had been developing Drummer Boy for years, but ultimately held off on making it due to a rift in their own relationship. “Joel and I came to a personal and professional conflict to a point where we said, ‘I don’t know if we’ll ever work together again,'” the latter told The Christian Post. “I was quoted as saying very loudly, ‘I don’t want to ever work with Joel Smallbone again,’ and I think he probably would say the same thing on his side.”
However, around a year ago, the two took a lesson from their own story and mended their relationship. “We sat in the coffee shop, and we hugged, and we cried together, and we apologized for words that were said,” Ben continued. “And we decided in that moment that we’re going to endeavor to forgive and reconcile and make this movie together.” In the end, their own experiences became fuel for the story they told and, they believe, made it a much stronger, more real story overall. “What became the 2026 version is deeply, deeply personal because Joel and I literally lived and breathed unity and forgiveness and reconciliation in the process of making this film.”
Drummer Boy arrives in theaters on November 6. Check out our exclusive sneak peek in the player above.
