New Angel Studios Film 'After Death' Scores 4th Place at Box Office
"After Death", a faith-based film that explores the extensive evidence for life after death, closed out the weekend with $5 million in box office ticket sales finishing in fourth place.
As CBN News reported, the gripping feature film, which premiered on Oct. 27 in 2,700 theaters, explores the afterlife based on real near-death experiences, conveyed by scientists, researchers, and survivors, according to the movie's website.
It finished fourth behind Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour," "Five Nights at Freddy's" and "Killers of the Flower Moon" and is the second highest-grossing documentary, this year. Film critics attribute its success, in part, to the documentary being featured in a large number of theaters, HiT reports.
"Regardless of where you land on the issue, listening to the stories related in After Death is consistently captivating. Your opinion on the concept of an afterlife will be challenged and brought into greater focus," wrote AisleSeat.com critic Mike McGranagham.
Moviegoers have commented online sharing how the film has impacted them.
Watching @afterdeathfilm in Washington on opening day!#afterdeathmovie pic.twitter.com/jxjCH1GY95
— Stephen Gray (@stephengray_ca) October 28, 2023
One woman wrote on the "After Death Movie" Facebook page that the film helped her to forgive her father.
"The story of the man that hated his dad on after [death] ...changed me ...I hated my dad so much could not forgive him for the evil things he did to my mom ...I never wanted to forgive him ...but God made me realize my dad was a sick man...I'm glad my hate for him is over...it takes a lot of energy to hate for 71 years," she wrote.
A cancer survivor also commented on the film noting that the movie "gives people hope that they will be reunited with loved ones."
Jordan Harmon, the co-founder of Angel Studios, and the film's producer Jason Pamer hosted a livestream panel discussion earlier this month with a cardiologist, oncologist, and engineer whose decades of extensive research are featured in the movie.
"It's not a hallucination, it's reality," Dr. Michael Sabom said of the afterlife. "It is entirely possible that the soul can leave the body prior to final physical death...I think the near-death experience is a spiritual experience in the spiritual realm of the soul separating, but not separated entirely from the body."
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Sabom is a cardiologist who wrote Light and Death: One Doctor's Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences in 1982, exploring the validity of near-death experiences.
Dr. Jeffrey Long, an oncologist and the founder of the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation also joined the panel. He said his journey started decades ago when he was studying how to best treat cancer using radiation. That's when he stumbled across an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association describing near-death experiences.
"It stopped me in my tracks," he explained. "All my medical training told me you were either alive or dead. There was no in-between. But suddenly, I was reading from a cardiologist describing patients who had died and then came back to life, reporting very distinct, almost unbelievable experiences."
Long said he began to study near-death experiences or NDEs from a scientific standpoint and realized there were a few common themes in the described experiences.
Many people told Long about a "beautiful, unearthly, appropriately called 'heavenly' realm that has color and music so beautiful that it has no correlation like that on earth."
"It is so magnificent," he added.
Some of these stories have been captured in the film.
"These stories offer hope, challenge preconceived ideas of what death is, and causes us to reflect on what's important. You matter," Stephen Gray, the film's director and producer, wrote on X.
