The debate over whether sex scenes are necessary has quieted down in the last few years because there are fewer sex scenes than ever in Hollywood movies. Hollywood has heeded the cries from virginal moviegoers who have grown tired of watching hot people kiss in front of their families. It’s awkward, and they shouldn’t have to deal with it. Thankfully, Hollywood’s two biggest movies of the year—The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day—are fairly chaste, showing few nipples and even fewer butts. (It defies reason that Christopher Nolan deprived us of a good shot of that big Cyclops ass, but we digress.)
Despite Hollywood being stuck in a fairly sexless period, the “faith-friendly” indie studio, Angel, known for The Sounds Of Freedom, Young Washington, and the upcoming choc-aganda biopic Hershey, promises to show even less hog than the coastal elites in Tinsel Town. Appearing on Fox News, Angel co-founder Jeff Harmon says, “Hollywood generally kind of lives in a bubble” that has “drifted more and more away from the values-based audience that they used to serve.” Harmon believes, “as brothers and as fathers,” the major studios are failing them. To better serve his fellow brothers and fathers, who are tired of sitting through a couple of nude scenes in front of their sisters and daughters, Harmon made a solemn vow, “We promise there’s never going to be nudity, and there’ll never be sex on screen.” He continues:
“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. 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.”
Thankfully, Harmon doesn’t mention violence because there’s nothing in the good book that says faith-based moviegoers can’t enjoy Jim Caviezel blowing a child-trafficker’s head off. He adds, “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.”
In some ways, Harmon’s promise brings Angel back to its roots. Under the original name, VidAngel, Harmon and his brother Neal launched a start-up DVD-seller. For the low, low price of $20, the company would excise objectionable material from movies and send the cleaned-up versions directly to consumers. Customers could then sell the disc back to VidAngel for $19. That is, until the studios sued the company for cracking DVD and Blu-ray discs to make its edits, and the court ordered VidAngel to pay them $62 million in damages. VidAngel then tried a version of this on streaming before filing for bankruptcy in 2017 and resurrecting in 2020.
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