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Movie distributor/streamer Angel (formerly Angel Studios) released their quarterly earnings report last week. This company has gotten a lot of hype from a lot of analysts, and countless articles have hyped “Christian” films and TV shows.
So, now that we can look at actual numbers, how are they doing?
Not great.
But you wouldn’t know that from the headlines, which mainly focused on pre-sales for their big December release, David.
But here’s what you should actually take away from Angel’ latest earnings report (that I didn’t read in the coverage):
- Over the first nine months of 2025, their losses have grown by 61%. Losses in the last quarter were up 152% compared to a year prior.
- While revenue has grown, their marketing costs have exploded; Angel increased their marketing spend by $121 million in the first nine months of 2025.
- While their subscriber growth has been impressive, it may have already stalled out. When I went to Angel’s website in early September, they had 1.575 million subscribers, called Angel Guild members. (Actually, it set 1,575,997. They gave the exact number!) A month later, the number was the exact same. (I have screenshots.) But they recently updated the website to say, “approximately 1.6 million” members, and the number hasn’t been updated since 30-Sep. Given that Angel has frequently shared subscriber numbers outside of earnings reports, this makes me think the number is actually lower right this moment. But we’ll find out in February.
Here’s the key image, the income statement from their latest report:
As I explored in The Ankler, Angel is basically trying to grow subscribers at all costs— they even mentioned “recurring revenue” in their earnings summary—and they’re mainly getting it through increased marketing spending. That’s driving losses. So the key question is whether their 1.6 million new Angel Guild members—nearly one million of whom joined this year!—actually stick around after the marketing push ends. Given the huge influx of new members in such a short time period, it’s not clear what their actual retention rate will be.
But that’s not in the coverage I read! Nearly every outlet focused on the fact that their upcoming kids animated/musical film, David, has sold “nearly 3 million” presale tickets.
Of course, that number is also suspect. Premium Angel Guild members get two free tickets to Angel films, and if Angel counts those in pre-sales, then the number looks much less impressive. Not to mention, if you join Angel as an annual member right now, you get two free tickets to David in addition to the other benefits, which I discovered last night by going to their website.
In accounting terms, then, Angel is just transferring their subscriber revenue to ticket sales, since Angel will have to reimburse the theaters.
That’s not to say David might not do well. I hope it’s a surprise hit in December, and honestly, I may take my family to see it. (I’m frustrated Netflix didn’t put their latest animated family film in theaters, right as we have a family film drought in cinema.) I just think the “3 million in pre-sales” may be pretty misleading.
Anyways, that’s a longer intro than normal, but we got another jam-packed issue, and the theme is “Highlighting the misses.” Netflix had another animated kids film flop, showing that KPop Demon Hunters didn’t solve all their family film problems. Quiz question: what movie am I talking about? Do you know its name? Related, Apple TV+ (a streamer that gets a lot of buzz but scant criticism) had another notable flop. This is one of the main services I provide my readers. While other outlets ignore (non-box office) flops, I highlight them (which I can do thanks to my subscribers).
All that, plus Netflix’s The Diplomat slides in the ratings, more data on weekly releases helping streamers, dueling true crime TV series on non-Netflix streamers, a buzzy Netflix documentary winning the film battle, all the flops, bombs and misses for the week (there were a lot of them!), and a whole lot more.
But first, yes, as you can tell by the title of this article, I’m starting with Netflix and the NBA’s latest flop, Starting 5.
(Reminder: The streaming ratings report focuses on the U.S. market and compiles data from Nielsen’s weekly top ten viewership ranks, Luminate’s Top Ten Data, Showlabs, TV Time trend data, Samba TV household viewership, company datecdotes, Netflix hours viewed data, Google Trends, and IMDb to determine the most popular content. While most data points are current, Nielsen’s data covers the weeks of October 13th to October 19th.
You can find a link to my terminology here.)
Television – Omaha Productions Has Their Second Miss in as Many Weeks
Credit to the TV system of old, when a TV show got cancelled, the networks told us. Nowadays, if the streamers cancel a show, they usually tell us.
But everyone so often they don’t. And we’re left to read the tea leaves.
For example, in 2022, Amazon released the third season of Making The Cut, a barely-disguised mimic of Project Runway (a reality fashion competition show that starred the two hosts of Project Runway), and then…crickets. We never heard the status of a fourth season, but no one ever said it was cancelled either, leaving me to ask the question for Hollywood.
EMBED https://entertainment.substack.com/p/did-amazon-cancel-one-of-their-splashiest
Of course, this happened last season on Project Runway.
Safe to say that if Heidi Klum is returning to Project Runway, Making the Cut is dead. Call it “quiet cancelled”.
Again, if you remember back to 2019 and 2020, folks wrote articles saying that Amazon had fundamentally changed the reality game with Making the Cut. (In particular, they focused on the idea that customers could buy the clothes being showcased in the show, but that business plan has always been more hype than reality.) But this reality show never made the charts and got cancelled for being unpopular. Change the game it did not.
So today, I’m planting a flag that another (probably expensive) reality show with legitimate stars may have been cancelled by a different streamer, we just don’t know it for sure yet.
Has Starting 5 Already Been Cancelled?
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