Good morning, everybody. Thank you for being here. For those that do not know me, I am Eric Handler, the media and entertainment analyst here at Roth Capital. This morning we have Neal Harmon, the CEO and Co-founder of Angel Studios. Neal, welcome.
Thank you.
Great to have you here. Why don't we just start from a big picture perspective? Can you maybe talk about the mission of your core business as the Angel Guild? Let's talk about some of the differentiators of the Angel platform to compare to traditional streaming services such as Netflix or Amazon or Disney+.
Angel is a response. I mean, as founders, it's a response to Hollywood getting increasingly out of touch with us and our families. What we discovered as we founded this company is that Hollywood's out of touch with mainstream audiences. The best solution we could think of was to let the audiences decide rather than Hollywood. You know, the power brokers in Hollywood are the guilds, the Producers Guild, the Actors Guild, the Directors Guild, the big agencies. Now we have the audience guild. The Angel Guild is what we call it. We have 2.2 million members of the Angel Guild. They all have the right to vote on what comes to Angel. We can't distribute anything without their permission.
That differentiates us from the rest of the industry. One, we have the highest audience score per Rotten Tomatoes in the world. Netflix averages 59. Disney's in the 80s, Paramount's in the 80s, and we're at 93. Two is that the Angel Guild makes their choices based on values, so they're values-driven. Then the third differentiator is that we share the upside of our growth and of our revenue as royalties to our producing partners, whereas the rest of the streaming indu stry just pays a guaranteed check, and we share the upside. That sets us apart, and it's allowing us to get a better and better library of TV and film.
Yep. You know, you mentioned values driven content. Now, in the press, a lot of times you're described as faith-based type of studio, which is a very narrow definition of what you guys do. You and I have talked about this quite a bit. You know, religious themes is a small part. It's a part of what you do, but it's not everything. Maybe can you talk about the types of genres and the breadth of the content that you have that is considered values-driven?
Well, Luke, our head of investor relations, is here with us. If you raise your hand, if anyone wants to reach out to him. He was with an investor just the other night, and they were having dinner, and in the conversation they started talking about Tuttle Twins. They had young kids, and so they watched Tuttle Twins episodes that night. We just released Solo Mio starring Kevin James, which is a rom-com.
A good rom-com.
Very good.
I'll give you props on that one.
Yes. It's the highest rated rom-com ever, 96 Rotten Tomatoes audience score at release. We released a post-apocalyptic thriller that has a huge prepper male audience. You know, Dad can go on an incredible adventure, and Mom and Dad can watch the rom-com together. The kids can watch Tuttle Twins together. Sometimes people have compared Tuttle Twins to Bluey for capitalists. It teaches freedom and economics, and it's really funny. It's an animated show. We've got thrillers. We are faith-friendly adventures, animation, historical dramas. We have a war epic that's coming this year. The breadth of what the Angel Guild selects is truly remarkable and very genre agnostic.
Yep. Now, you talked about, you know, since launching your streaming platform in fourth quarter of 2023, you've gone from 8,000 members to 2.2 million members, you just announced. How do you think about the addressable market for the Guild?
2.2 million Guild members as part of our community, that's just the community that's deciding. We have over 100 million app downloads of Angel, and we offer a free product that a lot of people can watch. There's over 1 billion views of Dry Bar Comedy annually. I think we're up to 6 billion views total on just Dry Bar, which is a stand-up comedy that's funny for everyone. The market for global TV and streaming is growing 21% year-over-year to $865 billion by 2034. Angel is very focused right now on the domestic market.
You know, given the breadth of the audiences that we're attracting with the kind of titles that I was describing to you, and this year we have actors like Pierce Brosnan, Andy Serkis, Ben Kingsley, Seth Rogen. Like, we have talent that's coming to Angel and being released on Angel that's just expanding the size of the audience. We also have genres that are expanding the size of the audience, like we just broke into romantic comedy, we're doing this animated feature on Animal Farm, which is one of the, you know, most talked about books, and that everyone reads in high school. We're doing a 250-year anniversary celebration of the birth of this nation with Young Washington.
We've got three or four announcements that are coming out at CinemaCon. We believe that Angel is as mainstream as it gets. Now look at Netflix, they've got 84 million subscribers in the U.S. Why would Angel not be able to reach that kind of scale? I don't see a compelling argument given the audience experience that we're delivering and the trust that's building around the Angel brand that it's we just need to build awareness and it's a huge total addressable market.
Can you maybe talk about, you know, it's interesting that your members, you know, vote on the content. Can you maybe talk about the process? 'Cause I think that's something that a lot of people don't necessarily fully grasp at this point.
Yeah. All of you could download the Angel App and become a Guild member right now. If I go onto my Angel App and I click on the Guild tab, I will be given some of the options that are being presented to the Angel Guild, and filmmakers are producing over 1,000 films every year without distribution, which sounds crazy, I'm sure, to this audience. Why would people spend that kind of money when they don't yet have distribution? There's something inside of humans that we have a need to tell stories, and billionaires, doctors, foundations, there are people that are just making stories all the time, and they figure if they make the stories, then they'll eventually find an audience for it.
Traditionally, film festivals like Sundance would go and help build a market for those films to find an audience or to find a buyer. Angel is like a 24/7 film festival where all these thousands. We believe that that's gonna grow to 10,000, 100,000 a year with AI, with the advent of AI. We're gonn a be very well positioned to help that, the very best stuff rise to the top because we have this huge community that is motivated to buy story and to select the very best stories. Now I've lost my train of thought.
No, but in terms of like, how do people like, once you're on the app, how do you essentially participate to vote on content?
Yeah. The point I was trying to get to is that each of us would get a different title, and what we do is we sample. Right now, Animal Farm, when Animal Farm is complete, they sent a version of Animal Farm through the Guild. They voted on it, they gave them feedback, and then the Animal Farm producers made a new cut, they sent it in again, they gave them feedback, and each time that they adjust, they get a better and better score. Once they feel like they have a high enough score to go to market, we won't take anything to market unless it has a score of over 70. That's the process by which the Angel Guild and Angel's brand is enhanced and protected by audience feedback.
It's essentially finding product market fit, de-risking the title before we actually put up the kind of marketing dollars that are gonna need to go behind a title to make it big and to release it. The Guild technology we built ourselves, you can get it on the TV apps, you can get it on your phones. You just click on the Guild tab, and then you make a pledge to choose excellent stories that are true, honest, noble, just, authentic, lovely or admirable. That's our North Star, is those values. You just say whether or not you like it and give them feedback and you get to be like a virtual producer.
You're a test audience. Yeah.
Yeah.
That's great. A couple of weeks ago, you reported your fourth quarter earnings. You talked a little bit about the year ahead. Can you maybe talk about sort of like the strategic goals for 2026?
The Angel Studios' value to the world is the Guild community that we're building.
Mm-hmm.
If you were to ask me what our strategy is, it's always grow the Guild. Now I would add on the side of that is to do it sustainably. We announced that we are guiding towards less than $25 million in adjusted EBITDA loss this year, as opposed to $138 million last year. This is a big announcement for us that we now have the scale and the base to be able to grow, but to do so, you know, with a clear line of sight to profitability.
Great. You know, in terms of, I mean, you're a streaming platform, but how does theatrical sort of fit into the importance of what you're doing as a streaming platform?
How does a small startup from Utah have a 93% audience score is releasing genre titles, animated films that are like Pixar quality. How are we doing that? How do we compete with Netflix's checkbook, Amazon Prime's checkbook, Apple's checkbook? We do that through our community.
Mm-hmm.
Kevin James is a really good example of this. He had two films. One was Solo Mio, and the other one was Playdate with Alan Ritchson. Playdate got sold to Amazon Prime for an upfront check. However that film did, they got the same amount of money. It didn't do very well with the audience. It got in the 30s on Rotten Tomatoes.
Mm-hmm.
He brought Solo Mio to Angel because he believes it's his best film he's ever made, and so he thinks it's going to generate income for a long, long time. Angel's model allows him to share in that income. We got the better title with the smaller checkbook. The reason that he wanted the upside, and he also felt like that Solo Mio and cinema in general is meant to be experienced together as community, especially in this hyper-connected world. Like, people want. In fact, by the way, his gut isn't wrong. Like, you think Kevin James, well, he's an older actor, so, you know, the theaters have gone. They're history. That's not true.
The strongest demographic for the theaters right now is Gen Z, and they grew from 2024, 4.9 movies to 2025, 6.1 movies. They're also the fastest-growing demographic, 25%. All these people who grew up on these devices and are addicted to devices love to unplug, love to experience things in community. Kevin James is not alone. You talk to famous YouTubers, famous TikTokers, you talk to people in the filmmaking world. The pinnacle of the creative career is to get on the silver screen, to be important enough to society that people will show up, sit in a seat in a community, and experience your story.
Because we offer that, and we offer it better, like Netflix doesn't offer that, we outdid MGM the last two years. That's Amazon's theatrical offering. Those two things allow us to compete with the big checkbooks of the other places and get better and better quality titles that will allow us to grow the size of our market and be able to address a larger portion of that total addressable market. It's a strategic play for us. We see theatrical as a break-even part of our business, and we see it as attracting filmmakers and creating experiences for the guild members in person that help them with retention. We don't see that as the profit driver for the business. We see the actual guild revenue stream as the core. It wouldn't be possible to build as large of a guild revenue stream and as fine of a library if we didn't offer that.
I guess that sort of leads to the question of, you know, is theatrical sort of the biggest driver of membership? Is that where you see your biggest return in terms of volume of new members for growth?
Definitely the theatrical titles end up carrying the lion's load of bringing in guild members, but we're bringing guild members from back library catalog like Martin Sheen's The Way and documentaries. Like, each of these will tap into a niche market, so we're not exposed to just the eight titles we're releasing this year that are big. We're bringing in. AI allows us to go and hyper target with scale and volume, like, we're gonna double our library essentially again this year. To be able to do marketing campaigns and build them out around each title in its unique genre and its unique audience and with its unique talent, we try to.
You know, we're experts on generating as much conversion, as much retention on each of these titles. Theatrical is the most important for attracting the best new filmmakers. It also generally speaking produces more, attracts more guild members. It's still dispersed among the variety of titles that we have.
You mentioned, you know, you're doubling the size of your catalog this year. You're actually now for the first time going outside of Angel-owned content. Can we talk about some of the sort of third-party licensing arrangements that you're doing? I assume that's the goal is to, you know, use that as a churn reducer.
Yeah. The goal is that we, you know, the guild members, they're what they're wanting is to have an impact on the film industry when we ask them what they want. Then they're wanting great storytelling for the next generation, for our culture. That's not gonna be just what we produce or what we partner with, filmmakers. Because this guild is at $360 million in revenue, and as of December 31, we've paid out $228 million in cumulative royalties to filmmakers since our inception. That number just keeps growing and growing and growing.
We had a filmmaker who called us and said, "I think you added a zero to my wire this quarter." Shocked because the size of the royalty checks that are going out to titles, people are not experiencing that with their, you know, their Netflix contracts, with their YouTube payouts, with where people are normally expecting to be paid. When they see those numbers, people are shocked, and it's becoming like a gravity force where very great titles. Now we've got Samuel Goldwyn Films that's bringing us as many titles as they can get onto the platform, the Amplify Light. Lionsgate sent their first two titles. We're happy with the results, and they're sending more titles. There's StudioCanal.
We've seen submissions now going through the system from multiple other studio brands, BBC and the Universal titles and like there are big studios. We expect this year we'll have a number of, like, large master agreements with partners like these and give them an opportunity to generate more revenue from their catalog, give the Guild members in a wonderful, highly curated library with tons of genres and
People are not gonna be running out of content to see.
Correct. It's gonna be the best of the best content and so that's very exciting for us this year because we're not just pulling from the independent libraries anymore. Now we're starting to pull from studio libraries.
Now let's talk about, you know, as your platform, you're not a studio that necessarily creates your own content. You, people come to you with their content, but you have made select investments to own content like David, that movie came out, and there are some series, Homestead, I believe you purchased and Tuttle Twins you purchased. Can you maybe talk about what is it that, you know, what type of content are you willing to buy to own versus, you know, content that is, you know, more of a partnership?
The 99% of the content of these films and TV shows will be partnership agreements where we don't. Like, as a strategy, we're not putting out capital. We're not putting out the CapEx to buy or produce film. That's a highly risky business. We're in the business of surfacing the best stuff after those risks have been taken. Now, independent TV, it's never been done before, and a TV show, once we've proven it, that it has a really good Guild engagement, that it has a really good Guild score, we see retention numbers in that. We see watch time in that we made the strategic decision last year to acquire our highest-rated show ever.
Mm-hmm
Young David and the movie David and our top most watched shows, Homestead, Tuttle Twins, and Wingfeather Saga. That's an exception. That was part of you know, starting a company and getting a platform up and running. That was a strategic move that we made now. We are on the producer side of the equation there, and we get all the profits on those titles moving forward. Those titles are gonna be tentpoles for our future. I wouldn't expect. I'm not gonna say it wouldn't necessarily happen, but it's not part of the long-term strategy. Those are exceptions that had more to do with our beginning than they have to do with our future. Might be possible, but that's not the way we're looking at the market.
There's just kind of a cold start problem, if you're familiar with that term.
Mm-hmm
in building a market and a network. Uber, in the beginning, needed to own a few of their cars-
Mm-hmm
to get started in Palo Alto and make sure that they formed a market in that very first neighborhood, and then it started growing from there, and then they didn't ever have to buy cars. Angel will be on a similar trajectory.
I hope the content they do own now should have legs that, you know, are evergreen for many years to come.
Correct.
We still have a couple minutes. What about the international market, and how are you thinking about, you know, the global expansion of your platform?
One of the fun things about being at Angel is I can wear an Angel shirt anywhere in the world, and I will get stopped. I will get stopped on planes. I will get stopped in walking off of planes in El Salvador, in Europe. Everywhere I go, I have yet to wear an Angel shirt and not get stopped. The brand is recognized, and it's growing, and people love it. We're very focused on the domestic market and winning here when it comes to building a guild and supporting the content flow of that guild. Our current thinking around the international markets is twofold. Today, we're building a great library, and we're spreading that library through distribution partners. David is going to 43 markets.
We launched David in December, and now it's gonna be going to a large part of the world through partners. As we become profitable, our vision is to then take what we've learned and build out a guild in regional markets and languages and then start rising up films within those markets. Like, there'll be films. In fact, we've had one without intending to start to build guilds elsewhere. We had a Brazilian film that was rated high enough and got submitted to the guild in Portuguese, and it passed the guild, and it's very—it's a beautiful film.
We intend to invest in making that happen so that Brazil can have its own guild, its own success stories in that market, and then some of those might bubble up to the global market. That's the goal long term is to begin building out market by market after we reach profitability.
That's great. I think we've reached our time. I look forward to seeing how the story develops over the next year, and we'll see you back next year for this as an even bigger company.
Thank you, Eric, for the conversation.