“Sadly, The Chosen, Inc. chose to terminate its agreement with us,” Harmon continued. “We hope that one day the agreement will be restored—and we plan to pursue the appeal provision that Angel and The Chosen agreed to as the process for resolving disagreements privately.”
In the June 18 livestream, Jenkins reiterated previous statements he has made expressing appreciation for Angel Studios. “They were our original distributor of ‘The Chosen,’ and they had a tremendous role in getting the first two seasons out to you,” Jenkins said. “They had a tremendous role in the launching of this show and the launching of our crowdfunding that made Season 1 and 2 possible.”
“I’ll always be forever grateful to Angel Studios for their role in all of that. I love those guys over there,” he said, “and I congratulate them on some of the other projects that they’ve been distributing that have had a lot of success and so bear no ill will towards Angel Studios, but we’re no longer with them.”
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Jenkins went on to recount that “in 2023, we actually entered into an arbitration with Angel Studios because of multiple, significant contract violations.”
“And so we went into a private arbitration, and fortunately, as I announced last year, the arbitrator ruled overwhelmingly in our favor, and so that…allowed us to be free to pursue other relationships, other partnerships,” Jenkins said.
Those partnerships include the show’s partnership “with Come and See, which is the nonprofit organization that finances our productions, and Prime Video, which is now our new third-party distributor, and where you can watch Season 5 exclusively at the moment,” said the director.
Referring to Angel’s choice to appeal the arbiter’s decision, Jenkins said, “That was expected, and just last week, we got the fortunate news that three independent arbitrators reviewed the case in-depth and independently, all independently, upheld the original decision.”
“And so this arbitration case is officially closed. The contract is officially terminated forever, essentially,” said Jenkins. “And so this was wonderful news that we were able to kind of put that episode behind us.”
“Angel actually reached out to me this past week and said, ‘Would you like to collaborate on a statement once the ruling comes through?’” Jenkins shared. “Which typically I would want to do in the spirit of cooperation.”
“But at the same time that I was being asked if I wanted to collaborate on a statement,” he said, “I was also finding out that Angel has filed a new arbitration against us.”
“This is not uncommon. There have been multiple legal situations that we’ve dealt with over the last couple of years with Angel,” said Jenkins, “and they actually said in the past that this would be the case, that there would be lots of legal action taken for a long time.”
