The messiest, most controversial box-office hit of the year appears to have struck streaming gold, after all. Sound of Freedom, the child-trafficking action movie starring Jim Caviezel that earned $242 million at the box office this summer, is going to Amazon’s Prime Video. Hopefully Prime Video’s subscribers enjoy it once it hits the service on December 26, because the privilege was certainly a costly one: Vulture previously reported the film was in a bidding war, and that the winning streamer would have to pay a licensing fee of at least “eight figures, which is rare.â€
Whatever the final bill wound up totaling (those numbers haven’t been made public), Prime Video — the service previously best known for paying $715 million for The Rings of Power — felt this divisive movie was worth it, even as the rest of the streaming business globally contracts. Theatrical audiences came out hard for Sound of Freedom over the summer, presumably seeing something interesting in its QAnon-adjacent, overblown, action-fantasy premise about child sex-trafficking. Its critics, like Rolling Stone’s Mile Klee, saw “a superhero movie for dads with brainworms.†So if you’re morbidly curious what that looks like, Amazon Prime Video will be the place for you.