The American box office is seeing an unlikely hit this summer with the release of Sound of Freedom, a film “based on a true story,” but used by its star to promote his belief in an international black market where a barrel of children’s body parts goes for a thousand times the price of a barrel of oil.
In the film, Jim Caviezel plays Tim Ballard, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security agent who investigated pedophiles.
- Ballard later founded the anti-trafficking group Operation Underground Railroad, and was previously appointed to a federal advisory board on human trafficking by Trump.
The film is a straightforward search-and-rescue thriller, in which Ballard goes rogue to free a young girl from the clutches of a Colombian sex-trafficking ring.
But the movie has been promoted in a cloud of innuendo by its star and other right-wing activists willing to promote QAnon conspiracy theories.
Caviezel, who played Jesus Christ in Mel Gibson’s 2004 movie “The Passion of the Christ,” has promoted the film on Steve Bannon’s podcast, saying “there is a big storm coming,” a movement motto, and mentioning “adrenochrome,” a hormone that QAnon adherents say progressive elites harvest from their child victims.
Caviezel admits to Bannon that he did a lot of research on the topic.
In a “special message” that ran over the movie’s closing credits, Caviezel addressed the audience directly, on his way to pitching the “Pay It Forward” program that, by allowing moviegoers to buy advance tickets for others while they were still in the theater, allowed Sound of Freedom to leap to the top of the box office on its opening day, surpassing Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
Slate
The movie was independently produced for $14.5 million by Utah-based Angel Studios, and produced $19.7 million over the Fourth of July weekend and $40 million over seven days.