Yes, it is.
"It's being marketed to QAnon believers, it's being embraced by this community and its leading actor is a huge part of the QAnon community,"
The director of child trafficking thriller Sound of Freedom has distanced himself from
QAnon believers who have celebrated his film as championing their cause, saying comments made by the film’s star Jim Caviezel “hurt my work”.
He said he felt “really sick” when he saw Sound of Freedom being described in the media as linked to QAnon. “It was heartbreaking when I saw all this polemic and all this controversy going on. My instinct was to run. I want to hide,” he said. “I don’t want to give any more interviews. Before the movie came out, I did a couple of interviews.”
Caviezel has previously denied having ties to QAnon but has repeated several of its talking points on conservative talk shows and at QAnon-organised events, including that he believes in “andrenochroming”, a QAnon term for the falsehood that traffickers torture children and drain their blood to harvest an elixir of youth.
Since it was released on 4 July, Sound of Freedom has made US$173m (£136m, A$266m) in the US and Canada, beating Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning at the domestic box office. Its success has been attributed to, in part, a pay-it-forward scheme where viewers are asked to scan a QR code at the end to buy more tickets so other people can see it for free.
dig deep@the Grunaida
Sound of Freedom, the religious, “QAnon adjacent” child-smuggling film that has enthralled conservatives across the US, passed the $100m mark in ticket sales on Thursday.
But as the movie continues to cause controversy – with its star touring conservative media
to peddle conspiracy theories about unnamed persons harvesting chemicals from children’s blood and anti-trafficking experts
criticizing the film’s entire premise – questions are also being asked about who is actually watching it and whether that many people are watching it at all.
Angel Studios, the film’s distributor, set up a controversial “pay it forward” scheme for Sound of Freedom. There’s a message at the end of the film and a
prominent link on the studio’s website urging viewers to buy an extra ticket “for someone who would not otherwise be able to see the film”.
It has clearly been working. On 4 July, the day of the film’s release, nearly 20% of its sales came from people who bought those extra tickets,
IndieWire reported. But there are growing suggestions that a lot of those extra tickets aren’t actually being used: that the sales figures might be over-inflating Sound of Freedom’s significance.
According to Fandango, all but 28 seats had been sold for the 3pm screening of Sound of Freedom. As the lights dimmed, however, the Guardian counted 45 vacant seats dotted around the half-empty theater. Minutes before the 6.30pm screening, Fandango showed that only two seats were still available. Again, there were more than two vacant spots as the film began.
dig deeper@the Gauarniad