(LifeSiteNews) — Sound of Freedom, a movie exposing the reality of child trafficking, beat the film of Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour in popularity at the domestic box office, becoming the 10th highest grossing movie of 2023.
Both movies were released in theaters in the United States last year and received wide acclaim. Sound of Freedom portrays the work of former Homeland Security agent Tim Ballard, who left his government job to found Operation Underground Railroad and devote his skills to saving children from sex trafficking.
The Eras Tour, on the other hand, is a filmed documentary of Swift’s massive music tour which is running from March 2023 until December 2024. Last month, it became the highest grossing tour in history, exceeding $1 billion in profits. This record was made shortly after Swift was named TIME’s Person of the Year.
According to IMDb’s Domestic Box Office Mojo report, Sound of Freedom grossed a total of $184,178,046 since its release on July 4, 2023. It was shown in 3,411 theaters across the United States. Total gross earnings for The Eras Tour capped at $179,650,565. The documentary film was released months after its number 10 competitor, on October 13, 2023, and streamed in 3,855 theaters domestically.
While both Sound of Freedom and The Eras Tour received significant support from viewers across the country, they fell short of other cinematic smash hits at the box office, including the controversially feminist Barbie (2023’s highest grossing movie in the United States) and Oppenheimer (number five at the box office), which tells the story of the creation of the atomic bomb during the World War II Manhattan Project.
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The Super Mario Bros. Movie; Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse; Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 The Little Mermaid; Avatar: The Way of Water; Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania; and John Wick: Chapter 4 were the other movies which beat out Sound of Freedom and The Eras Tour in the 2023 domestic box office.
The anti-trafficking movie sparked a renewed conversation about the tragic and prevalent issue of child sex trafficking around the globe. Prior to its release, Sound of Freedom attracted the attention of public figures like Elon Musk, who suggested that the film be streamed on his social media platform X, formerly Twitter.
During a May 2023 interview with Steve Bannon, the acclaimed Catholic actor and star of the film, Jim Caviezel, triggered renewed interest in the case of the notorious criminal Jeffrey Epstein, who was convicted in 2019 of sex trafficking minor girls. When speaking about Sound of Freedom, Caviezel said, “Epstein Island isn’t the only island out there where they have… children.”
Although Epstein is reported to have committed suicide in prison while awaiting his trial on these federal sex trafficking charges, information about his connections with people of wealth and power continues to be released. Most recently, a judge ordered the unsealing of hundreds of documents revealing names of Epstein’s accusers, associates, and other members of the sex offender’s network.
Sound of Freedom also sparked renewed zeal for working to end child trafficking. Following an international screening of the powerful movie, the president of El Salvador vowed to fight child trafficking from his leadership position. A similar promise of action was made more recently by Argentina’s president elect Javier Milei, who signed an agreement to “eradicate any type of child trafficking in Argentina.”
Milei’s signature was witnessed by renowned Catholic and pro-life actor Eduardo Verástegui, who produced Sound of Freedom.
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