Jeffrey Harmon, Chief Content Officer of faith-skewed upstart development, film finance and distribution company Angel Studios, swapped its home city of Provo in Utah for London this week.
The exec touched down in the UK capital for a gala screening on Sunday of episodes one and two of UK director Paul Syrstad’s series Testament. The contemporary adaptation of the biblical New Testament tome, the Acts of the Apostles is shot against the backdrop of London.
“The entire team behind Testament is London-based. They filmed it here in London, they’re all from the UK. We came here to celebrate the launch with the team,” says Harmon, co-founder of Angel Studios with brothers Neal, Daniel and Jordan Harmon, as well as cousin, Benton Crane.
Angel Studios also has a growing distribution footprint in the UK, thanks to its recently formed partnership with faith-based distributor Kova Releasing, which kicked off this spring with biopic Bonhoeffer, about anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and animation The King of Kings.
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“We’ve launched a lot of theatrical releases here and we think that Testament will resonate well with the British audience,” says Harmon, who is also predicting success in other English-language territories.
Testament is on a slate of productions backed by the Sound of Freedom distributor, filming or due to film in the UK and Ireland over the coming months.
“The number of productions we’re filming here is pretty significant,” says Harmon.
They include fantasy series The Wayfinders, with Mackenzie Crook (Pirates of the Caribbean) Tamara Smart (Percy Jackson, Evan Nikolas Fields (Hacks) and Vincent Mattis (Teenwolf: The Movie) – which is produced by U.S. company Arrowstorm and Limerick-based Dark Day Picture and currently shooting in Ireland; children’s show Tuttle Twins, which is animated in Ireland and the UK; and Young Washington.
“It’s a movie,” says Harmon of the latter project. “It will shoot here later this year and come out on the 250th anniversary of the United States (July 4, 2026). It’s being filmed here to get the right type of environment that feels more like when George Washington grew up,” he says.
Further UK-based projects in the works include Fellowship, about the friendship between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as they wrote their respective classics, The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, which is being developed by Testament director Syrstad.
Harmon also sees connections in the strong presence of British and Irish voice cast members on The King of Kings, which included Kenneth Branagh, Pierce Brosnan and Ben Kingsley alongside U.S. stars such as Uma Thurman and Mark Hamill, as a further connection.
Testament
Spearheaded and show run by Syrstad, Testament retells the early days of Christianity following the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
The series begins on the day of the Pentecost, on which, per the Acts of the Apostles, the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles and other followers of Jesus of Nazareth while they were in Jerusalem celebrating the Jewish Feast of Weeks, or Shavuot.
Angels Studios, which co-financed Testament with Vicky Patel, Steve Barnett and Alan Powell’s London-based Monarch Media, has global rights to the show and will launch it on its streaming App on June 8, to coincide with the Pentecost religious feast this year.
The drama is produced by Jackie Sheppard for Syrstad’s UK faith-based film production company Roarlight Ltd.
The ensemble cast features Eben Figueiredo (SOLO: A Star Wars Story), Charlie Beaven (The Crown), Yasmin Paige (Submarine), Stewart Scudamore (Carnival Row), Mogali Masuku (The Gold), Tom Simper (EastEnders), Kenneth Omole (Top Boy), John Omole (Chewing Gum), Aadar Malik (Modern Love Mumbai), Bobbie Little (Doctor Strange In The Multiverse of Madness), Gary Oliver (Game of Thrones), Mido Hamada (American Sniper), Solomon Israel (Doctor Who), and Lizzie Hopley (The Crown).
Angel Studios first connected with Syrstad through his 2022 feature, Testament: The Parables Retold, for which it took global rights and delivered more than two million online views. The director, who has been giving regular updates on the show’s progress on social networks, has said he is planning five eight-part seasons of the show.
The London-setting – which sees the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich stand in for the long-destroyed Temple in Jerusalem and the descent of the Holy Spirit take place in a housing estate – is disconcerting.
Harmon says the transposition of the story to a London backdrop follows a tradition of biblical imagery adapted to the territories and eras in which it was created.
“If you look at Africa, Jesus and the Nativity look like Africans; if you go to Germany, they look like Germans; if you go to India, they look like Indians and if you go to Asia, they look like Asians,” he says.
“In every single area, the artists have taken the story of Jesus and taken artistic liberties to make something that’s relatable to the population at that time. If you go to Italy, Jesus is at the Passover dinner and there are fluffy rolls on the table. These paintings wouldn’t have made any sense to the Jews because it was the Feast of Unleavened Bread.”
He believes the near-future, undefinable period of the drama will appeal to contemporary audiences.
“Today, people want dystopian alternate universes. It’s a dystopian alternate world where they don’t have guns, they have swords still, but there’s electricity. It’s a totally different world with different rules from right now.”
Angels Studios’ investment in the drama has been partly raised through its Angel Guild program under which members pay a monthly fee in return for a say on future film and shows, as well as perks such as free tickets for theatrical releases and exclusive behind the scene content.
“If you’re part of the Angel Guild, you watched Testament a long time ago when it was rough cuts and Sound of Freedom before it came out in theaters; you watched King of Kings before it was even finished being animated and you’re able to give the directors feedback,” says Harmon.
“There’s 1.2 million people in that Guild from over 155 countries voting on the films and TV series that are coming into Angel Studios,” he adds, explaining
This represents a close to five-fold jump in the 250,000-strong figure quoted by CEO Neal Harmon in an interview with Deadline 14 months ago.
“It’s replacing the gatekeeper system that’s existed in Hollywood, which is where about a dozen people make all the decisions over 95% of the box office. We’re flipping that on its head and saying, let’s just ask the audience what they actually want,” he continues.
Angel Studios also raises finance through its regulated crowdfunding platform, Angel Funding, which has supported close to 30 productions to date. According to information posted on its home page, Testament raised just under $900,000 from some 1,800 backers over two crowdfunding rounds.
Harmon highlights Angel Studios’ innovative payment system for filmmakers, which is based on watch time for a film or show per month on the Angel Studios platform as a percentage of the entire watch time for all the content available.
“We’ve paid out $179 million so far to filmmakers as of March of this year,” he says, bringing up the company’s website, showing the data. “Every filmmaker can come on here calculate what they should get. Every other streamer plays a flat fee. We’re making it so that filmmakers earn on the upside, which is something that hasn’t happened since the DVD, Blu-ray era. This brings us back to the Golden Age of Hollywood, so that when filmmakers make a great piece of art, they get timeless residuals.”
The model is paying off both at the box office with The King of Kings grossing $67M worldwide since its theatrical launch on April 11, while the company’s most recent release The Last Rodeo has grossed $10.75M in North American since opening on May 23, the same days as Lilo & Stitch and Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.
“This year we’re putting eight movies in theaters and over 100 movies on streaming and several series as well… in box office, we’re already top ten in the U.S. We have been in there in 2023 and 2024. In 2025 we’re already number 9 in the box office, neck and neck with MGM, but we’re just getting started,” says Harmon.
The company’s recent track record marks a comeback for the Harmon brothers, who built Angel Studios on the ashes of their previous distribution venture, VidAngel.
The family-friend label came a cropper after it was slapped with a multi-million-dollar copyright lawsuit by Disney, Warner Bros. and other major Hollywood studios for making unauthorized cuts – of scenes deemed unsuitable for family viewing by the brothers – to their movies and series on their catalogs.
The studios won and were granted a $62m settlement, reduced to $10m, to be repaid over 14 years, while the label was barred from streaming any of the complainants’ titles.
Undeterred, the family reemerged from their legal battle to the launch Angel Studios in March 2021, with a new model in which they help bankroll original content in which they have input from the start. They also continued to run their creative ad agency Harmon Brothers, which launched in 2013.
Much is written about the family’s Mormon connections but Harmon is keen to emphasize that Angel Studios’ slate goes beyond faith-based storytelling.
He points to fantasy adventure series The Wayfinders, directed by Glen Winter (Smallville) and created by Jason Faller and Kynan Griffin (The Outpost), with co-writers Adam F. Goldberg (The Goldbergs), Hans Rodionoff (The Muppets Mayhem), and Justin Partridge.
“It’s not a faith series. The filmmakers are believers, but the series is not faith any more than The Lord of the Rings is faith,” he says.
In a further sign of the company’s growing footprint, it will receive the inaugural “Breakout Distributor of the Year” awards at CineEurope 2025, the long-running European cinema industry convention, due to take place from June 16 to 19 in Barcelona.
Harmon says it is an honor but suggests the company is only at the beginning of its growth journey. Quizzed on the scale of company’s ambitions in comparison to global platform Netflix, he replies: “A little less than half of our films having faith elements in them, but we’re mostly family friendly and that is the biggest market in the world. So absolutely, we expect to one of the big players.”