What You Need to Know About the $250 Million Movie ‘Sound of Freedom’

Barbie and Oppenheimer were surprise blockbuster films, but the most astounding smash hit of the past year is Sound of Freedom, which came out of nowhere and made $250 million, more than the original release of The Godfather (in non-inflation-adjusted dollars). In the U.S., it was 2023’s ninth-biggest box office hit, beating Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour and Indiana Jones: The Dial of Destiny. It’s now streaming on Prime Video and available on demand.

“It’s an unexpected hit riding a wave of interest and popularity second only to the Barbenheimer phenomenon,” Comscore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian tells AARP.

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Here’s what you need to know about Sound of Freedom’s success and what it signifies:

Tim Ballard attends the premiere of "Sound of Freedom" on June 28, 2023 in Vineyard, Utah.

Fred Hayes/Getty Images for Angel Studios

Sound of Freedom is based on a true story — but it’s not a documentary

It’s about Tim Ballard (played by Jim Caviezel, 55, who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ). Ballard quit his U.S. Department of Homeland Security job to found Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), which works to prevent the sex trafficking of children. The movie dramatizes his raid on Colombian traffickers but changes many details — Ballard never killed a trafficker, for instance.

Vice News’ Tim Marchman investigated the film’s claims and told NPR, “They’re not whole-cloth falsehoods, but they reassemble things that are true or close to being true into stories that are just wildly and completely different from what actually happened.” The filmmakers disagree. “Every bad guy is real,” Ballard told the website History Vs. Hollywood, though he admits that Caviezel makes him look cooler than he really is.

It’s like a Liam Neeson movie, only better

Neeson’s wildly popular save-a-kid-from-foreign-sex-traffickers movie Taken was panned by critics, but Sound of Freedom got a positive 72 percent critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 99 percent positive rating from viewers. (Taken got 85 percent from viewers.) Variety called Sound of Freedom “a compelling movie that shines an authentic light on one of the crucial criminal horrors of our time, one that Hollywood has mostly shied away from.”