Dispatch from the Nashville Premiere of Angel’s David

For all the talk about Netflix dominance and declining movie attendance this fall, the scene at AMC Thoroughbred 20 in Franklin last Sunday seemed like a return to the halcyon days of 90s holiday moviegoing.

As invitees amassed in the lobby for the Nashville premiere of Angel Studios new animated musical David, the theater resembled a Christmas theme park. Families decorated holiday cookies featuring characters from the movie and frequented the hot cocoa and coffee bar before taking a break for balloon animals.

In place of red carpet hijinks, the studio partnered with nonprofit initiative Give A Little Christmas for a toy drive. Music industry locals who worked on the film’s soundtrack mingled with Christian artists and local church leaders. 

While movie premieres often reek of social climbing and pomposity, the attendees awaiting this early screening of David just seemed excited to be taking it all in. But, as Utah-based Angel has proven over the last three years, it's dedicated to approaching the movie business with a populist sheen–one that has much in common with Nashville’s own creative ethos. 

“Nashville has built a vibrant creative community that Angel has naturally been drawn to,” David Fischer, Head of Acquisitions at Angel, said. “Many of our closest filmmaking partners live and work there, and the values so often attributed to the heartland - authenticity, courage, faith, creativity, and a deep commitment to families - thrive just as strongly in Nashville as they do in Provo, Utah, where Angel is headquartered.”

Since it disrupted Hollywood with the unlikely summer blockbuster Sound of Freedom in 2023, Angel has made waves in the entertainment industry for its unique financing strategy that combines crowdfunding and microinvestment for the supporters in its “Angel Guild.”

Beyond its unique investment structure, the studio has also relied on its “pay it forward” plan, a mix of altruism and marketing that allows those who enjoyed one of its films to buy additional tickets so others can see it free of charge. 

In the years since Angel initially gained attention and amassed an international following, Hollywood’s indie sectors have adopted some touchstones of its business practices. Both awards powerhouse A24 and arthouse darling Mubi (last year’s multiple Oscar nominee The Substance), have created their own iterations of the Angel Guild, which reach out directly to fans with a membership program and complimentary tickets.

Other boutique divisions of major studios such as Universal’s Focus Features and Fox Searchlight have followed suit in an attempt to find a theatrical audience for their moderately priced prestige features that would otherwise be streaming fodder. Similar to the pioneering MoviePass subscription service, which forced theater chains to imitate or perish in the pre-COVID era, Angel has made an irrevocable impact on the industry that culminated with its IPO and $1.6 billion valuation in September. 

“I’m always searching for the next exceptional or inspiring feature film or series to put in front of our Angel Guild to vote on,” Fischer said. “The Nashville community is bursting at the seams with artists who want to Amplify Light, creating stories that are excellent, admirable, noble, authentic, lovely, just, honest, and true. That’s why Angel keeps showing up in Nashville: because artists here are producing the kind of stories the world needs.”

Since 2023,, Music City has emerged as one of the studio’s creative hubs and a location for series such as Bear Grylls' Miracle and the summer camp drama A Week Away. Franklin’s Ken Carpenter produced its 2023 sci-fi property, The Shift. Conservative intellectual Rod Dreher premiered several episodes of his Angel’s streaming documentary Live Not By Lies, which features survivors of Stalin, in collaboration with local personalities like Michael Knowles. 

Earlier this year, local film scene fixture and Lipscomb professor Steve Taylor partnered with director Seth Young on the Nashville-shot Sketch, a late-summer family feature about a young girl whose dark drawings come to life as she grieves her mother that recalls Disney’s sterling late-20th Century run of live-action movies. Many of the studio’s animated series, including Gabriel and the Guardians and The Wingfeather Saga also use local animators. 

For Angel publicist Callie Daruk, Middle Tennessee’s creative community makes the region an ideal site for both production and audience outreach. “The talent pool out of the Nashville area is extremely rich and certainly because we're deeply connected to the best as a studio, we're connected with many in the Nashville area,” Daruk said.“This is true across many forms of creativity - music, animation, filmmaking, etc. Nashville is also a great place for premieres due to that talent pool as well as a huge list of influencers in the area.”

That list of influencers may prove integral to the release of David, the Angel production since the release of Sound of Freedom most primed to gain the studio reentry into the blockbuster pantheon. Retelling the biblical story of David, the movie from South African director Phil Cunningham is the result of a 30-year filmmaking journey that recalls the Jewish King’s own exile and struggles. 

Thanks to Cunningham and co-director Brent Dawes’s attention to detail and the voice talents from the likes of Christian artist Lauren Daigle, the film should be going toe-to-toe critically with the likes of Zootopia 2 and KPop Demon Hunters. At the very least, it more than earns its animated musical street cred, reinvigorating the style that made Disney’s epic run of 80s and early 90s film a golden age of family films. 

As the audience last Sunday proved, the film more than holds the attention spans of younger viewers. At the same time, it never shies away from the story’s political and moral complexities, especially the fraught relationship between David and King Saul. The film may not bring about the return of the uncomplicated villain that many on X have spent the last few weeks hoping for. But it offers a portrait of two imperfect people battling their own personal weaknesses to honor the will of God.

Though David will be contending with the newest Avatar and Sydney Sweeney’s pulpy BookTok melodrama The Housemaid this weekend, it remains a formidable box office opponent for such traditional Hollywood heavyweights during the biggest moviegoing week of the year. So far, David has topped $6 million in ticket presales, a figure that proves it has even more audience appeal than Angel’s animated Easter hit The King of Kings last spring. Regardless of its box-office performance, David solidifies Angel’s place in Hollywood and the Metro Area’s increased prominence in an ever-shifting movie industry.

David is now playing in theaters.