Citizen Vigilante gets global distribution following free promo from Elon Musk

“There is, of course, a good and a bad side of the X posting,” Boll tells Variety. The good side, obviously, is all the free promotion that Musk did, presumably because he agrees with the movie’s politics. The bad is that he told people to download a movie, which hadn’t even been in theaters for two weeks yet, for free. “The question you have to evaluate is: Is that bringing more money in the end, or is that costing me a lot of money? You know, you get a lot of PR, but you don’t get a lot of money,” says Boll, who’s already scheming a sequel for 2027. “So, we will figure that out in the next four or six weeks.” 

Boll estimates that the film has made about $600,000 from iTunes, Google Play, Prime Video, and other app downloads against a $2 million budget. Surely there are people out there who agree with the film’s (by all accounts, incredibly unsubtle) political messaging and want to financially support it for that reason. But given that this is only really available at home, it seems unlikely that Boll could wind up with another Sound Of Freedom, even with the intervention of the world’s richest man.