Angel Studios draws line in sand with Hollywood, bans sex scenes, profanity in bold new pledge
FIRST ON FOX — Angel Studios is drawing a line in the sand against Hollywood's approach to entertainment, announcing sweeping new content standards that ban on-screen sex, nudity and certain profanity while promising millions of paying members the power to decide which movies and television shows make the cut.
In an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital, Angel Studios co-founder and Chief Content Officer Jeff Harmon said the entertainment industry has increasingly lost touch with the families it once served, prompting his company to establish what it calls "The Angel Promise."
"I think Hollywood generally kind of lives in a bubble," Harmon said. "These are excellent craftsmen. They're the best storytellers in the world. Hollywood has built the best storytelling infrastructure in the world."
"But at the same time, they've kind of drifted more and more away from the values-based audience that they used to serve," Harmon said. "And with that, in our view, as brothers and as fathers, as a father, Hollywood hasn't been giving me consistently what I need. Once in a while, you get a good one, but you have to sift through all these things to find your good movies and your good stories."
The new initiative, announced Thursday, establishes three core commitments governing Angel's entertainment offerings, namely, audience approval of content, strict standards involving sex and language, and expanded parental controls.
"We promise there's never going to be nudity, and there'll never be sex on screen," Harmon said, explaining that families participating in the Angel Guild will not have to worry about encountering such material when evaluating potential projects.
The company is also drawing a firm boundary around profanity, pledging that Angel's original productions will not misuse God's name.
"This is a completely unique one," Harmon said. "This has never really happened in Hollywood history."
Harmon described the restriction as part of the company's effort to build trust with religious families.
"What we promise our viewers is that this timeless principle that's thousands of years old, and we're a very faith-friendly studio, is that we're not going to have misuse of God's name on the system on any Angel original content," Harmon said. "So any content we create. Where we are originating, meaning it comes to Angel first, those shows, those TV shows and movies, will not have misuse of God's name, so that families of faith, 'cause we're a faith-friendly studio, can trust that language won't be there."
Under the new standards, the company also prohibits use of the F-word in its stories and profanity in titles submitted for children ages 12 and younger.
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The announcement represents a significant effort to distinguish Angel from traditional Hollywood studios, with the company placing its audience at the center of decisions about what gets produced and distributed.
Harmon said the Angel Guild, which has approximately 3 million paying members, gives viewers an opportunity to approve or reject projects before they enter the company's entertainment ecosystem.
"This is the first time in history that a major Hollywood studio, or top 10 studio in the United States, has come and said, we're going to let the audience have a veto right," Harmon said.
Under Angel's stated policy, films and television series must receive a score of at least 70 out of 100 from Guild members to qualify for inclusion in its entertainment ecosystem.
Harmon said the founders' experiences raising children helped shape the new standards.
"Angel was co-founded by four brothers and a cousin," he said, adding that the founders have 34 children between them.
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The goal, he explained, was to create entertainment that parents could trust without having to sift through potentially objectionable content.
The third component of the Angel Promise focuses on parental controls. Angel says Guild members will help establish recommended age ratings and plain-language descriptions of potentially sensitive material, while new controls in the Angel app will allow parents to tailor viewing choices to their families.
Harmon said the broader ambition is to reshape the relationship between filmmakers and audiences.
"Our goal was to set out and try to fix this problem of kind of stepping out of the Hollywood bubble and stepping into middle America's shoes," he said.
The company says its Guild has paid out nearly $300 million to filmmakers, while Harmon said more than 100 films were available for members to vote on at the time of the interview.
For Harmon, the new promise is about establishing permanent standards that will outlast any individual film, filmmaker or executive, and give families greater influence over the entertainment they consume.
Some of the studio's prominent recent films include "David" and "The King of Kings."