On December 19, 2025, four films opened in American theaters. Avatar: Fire and Ash. The SpongeBob Movie. The Housemaid. And a $60 million animated biblical musical about a shepherd boy with a sling, made by a studio most Hollywood executives still don’t take seriously.
David Movie finished its opening weekend at No. 2. It beat SpongeBob. It beat The Housemaid. It set a record. And then it ran for eight straight weeks.
Angel Studios is not a fluke anymore.
What the Film Actually Is
David Movie is an animated musical film based on the story of David Movie from the Book of Samuel in the Old Testament. It follows a young shepherd in Bethlehem — anointed by the prophet Samuel as the future King of Israel — through his clash with Goliath, his complicated friendship with King Saul’s son Jonathan, and his long, brutal road to the throne.
The film is a follow-up to Young David, a five-part animated miniseries that built the character and the audience before the feature was ever made. So when David opened, it wasn’t cold. A lot of the people in those seats already knew the story — and already cared about this version of it.
Directed by Phil Cunningham and Brent Dawes, the film runs 109 minutes and is rated PG. Voice cast: Brandon Engman as young David, Phil Wickham — a multi-platinum Christian music artist — as adult David, Lauren Daigle as Rebecca, and Asim Chaudhry as the menacing King Achish. Wickham also wrote and performs the music throughout. That’s not a minor detail. The songs are the engine of the whole thing.
Variety called it “a handsomely animated but generic biblical tale” — noting that the visuals are rich but the characters thinner than their costumes. The audience saw it differently. CinemaScore: A. Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score: 98%. That gap between critic and audience reaction is worth paying attention to.
The Numbers Tell the Real Story
David Movie opened to $22 million on its first weekend — the biggest opening weekend for a faith-based animated film in history. The previous record holder was The King of Kings, another Angel Studios film from earlier in 2025, which opened to $19.4 million.
By week five, its domestic total had crossed $78 million. The film ended its eight-week domestic theatrical run at $80.2 million in North America alone. On a production budget of $60.9 million, that’s a clean domestic profit before a single international ticket is counted, before streaming, before home video.
Here’s the number that deserves the most attention though: Angel Studios acquired the entire David franchise — film and TV rights — for $78 million before the movie opened. Angel contributed $31 million of that. They were buying something they hadn’t yet proven. And then it opened at No. 2 in the country.
That is either extraordinary confidence or extraordinary homework. Probably both.
Why Phil Wickham and Lauren Daigle Change Everything
What strikes me most about this casting is how deliberate it is.
Phil Wickham is not a household name in mainstream pop. But in Christian music, he is enormous — a multi-platinum artist whose songs are sung in thousands of churches every weekend. Lauren Daigle is even bigger: two Grammy wins, a Today show performance, 30 million monthly Spotify listeners. She is one of the best-known voices in faith-based entertainment, full stop.
Angel didn’t cast them because they couldn’t get bigger names. They cast them because those two names mean something specific to the exact audience they were targeting. Wickham’s voice doesn’t just carry the adult David — it carries the sound of a whole community’s worship. Every person in those seats who sings his songs in church heard something personal in the film. That’s not marketing. That’s design.
This is the thing Hollywood keeps getting wrong about faith-based films. They assume the audience is unsophisticated and will show up for anything carrying a religious label. Angel Studios knows better. Their audience is loyal, motivated, and specific. They will show up — but only for something that earns it.
David Movie earned it.
The Record That Barely Made Headlines
Before David Movie, the highest-grossing faith-based animated theatrical opening ever was The King of Kings — also released by Angel Studios — at $19.4 million.
David Movie beat that on its first weekend. Then it went on to beat The King of Kings‘ entire theatrical run. Then it crossed $80 million domestic, making it Angel’s second-highest-grossing film of all time domestically, behind only Sound of Freedom — which crossed $250 million worldwide in 2023.
Two of the top ten highest-grossing animated domestic theatrical releases of 2025 were Angel Studios films. Not Disney. Not DreamWorks. Not Universal. A five-year-old faith-based studio that started as a crowdfunding platform for independent filmmakers.
The major studios released that news the same way they always process inconvenient information: mostly in silence.
What Angel Studios Is Actually Building
The $78 million franchise acquisition didn’t just buy the David Movie. It bought the TV rights too — which means Angel is already exploring new episodes of Young David to extend what is now clearly a franchise property.
That is the model. Build the audience through television. Bring them to the theater for the feature. Acquire the IP before the film proves itself so you control what comes next. It is a tighter, leaner version of what Marvel spent a decade building, running on a fraction of the budget and aimed at an audience that Marvel never particularly tried to reach.
Whether David 2 gets made depends on numbers that aren’t fully public yet. But the direction is clear.
Angel Studios has now released three films in 2025 that performed well above their budgets — The King of Kings, David Movie, and a third release still running internationally. They are the most interesting studio story in American film right now. Not because they’re changing what stories get told in Hollywood, but because they’re proving those stories don’t need Hollywood at all.
David Movie didn’t need a giant’s armor. He showed up with a sling and five smooth stones.
Angel Studios is starting to feel like the same kind of bet.
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