In a world where Hollywood’s animation monopoly feels more like a Disney/Pixar-powered death grip on imagination, Angel Studios just flipped the script—and maybe the entire animation table—with The King of Kings, raking in a heavenly $19 million on opening weekend. That number makes it the biggest domestic launch ever for a faith-based animated film, steamrolling past previous genre titles like The Prince of Egypt ($14.5M), The Star ($9.8M), and Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie ($6.2M). Yeah, the vegetables never stood a chance.
Birthed from Angel’s crowdfunding-first creative model—a giant two-finger cross to the studio system—The King of Kings is an animated indie with soul, powered by the people and made for the people. The plot? A Dickensian bedtime story gone full-blown divine epic, with a boy journeying alongside Jesus through parables, pain, and purpose. It’s a high-concept, tear-jerking animated trip that dodges the preachy bullet and lands a punch right in the heart.
“Angel is out here doing something radical: listening to its audience.”
Critics might be split (that 63% Rotten Tomatoes critic score says some of them need to lighten up), but audiences aren’t playing games: a whopping 97% RT audience score and a rare A+ CinemaScore. Only four other animated films outside the Disney/Pixar empire have ever pulled off that kind of crowd love, and none of them were slinging sandals and salvation.
Angel’s theatrical czar, Brandon Purdie, put it bluntly: “Families want quality films to see together in theaters. This weekend simply reflects what audiences are craving.” In a year where four of the top ten box office hits are animated, it looks like the Mouse House no longer owns the sandbox.
With over 3,200 theaters showing the film and a long runway through Easter and beyond, The King of Kings might just hold the throne for a while. And while the suits at Disney, Universal, and the rest of the soul-sucking IP factories scramble to chase trends with AI scripts and superhero fatigue, Angel is out here doing something radical: listening to its audience.
Turns out, the faith-based crowd isn’t as niche as the gatekeepers thought—and they’re ready to storm the box office.
Quite an amazing achievement in this cynical age. For so long now, the big movie studios have been ‘Self-Obsessed’ in pushing their own agendas and willing to lose money doing so. Now, it seems audiences are looking for a more balanced message. You can only keep pure goodness out of entertainment for so long, then audiences begin looking for it once more. But it must be kept honest to succeed.
Such amazing news for this day and age. The big studios have been letting us down with their self-obsessed agenda pushing that it seems audiences are now looking for another kind of ‘thinking’ in their entertainment. Could this be leading to ‘personal honesty’?
If you give the audience what they want, they show up. Faith based movies aren’t my thing (unless you count my favorite, Ben-Hur) but you can’t deny there is a market for good faith content.
Maybe the ‘faith based’ moviemakers have learned how to talk to a new audience and be believable.