“It Did Very Well For Us” - The $50M Risk That Almost Broke The Daily Wire Strategy

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
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**Patrick Bet-David** (0:30)
In regards to the movie day, what was the name of the movie day, the big one?

**SPEAKER_3** (0:33)
The Pen Dragon Cycle.

**Patrick Bet-David** (0:34)
The Pen Dragon Cycle. Were you going for, like, was that your strategy to say, you know, screw it, I'm going to go for all the marbles, because if we nail this, this could be our house of cards. This could be our, you know, this could be our show that's going to bring us from whatever, 2 million subscribers to 10 million subscribers. We could be a household then. Was that kind of your strategy?

**SPEAKER_3** (0:53)
Absolutely, yeah. You know, if you look at the history of the films that we did during my tenure at The Daily Wire, you get bigger and bigger as we go, you take bigger and bigger risks, because you can't, you can't run the same play twice. You know, the first play was to acquire a movie that we didn't make, Dallas Sonier's Run, Hide, Fight, written and directed by Kyle Rankin. It's a fabulous film, we're very lucky to get it, and we got it because Dallas kind of got canceled in Hollywood after having made this film, and it didn't have a home. And, you know, it was Ben who actually saw the opportunity. Ben had interacted with Dallas in the past, and he spoke to Dallas and heard about the challenges that Dallas was dealing with with Run, Hide, Fight. And he called and said, hey, you need to talk to this Dallas guy. I think there's, you know, this could be a movie that we could pick up, and it had always been part of our strategy to move into making culture, not just criticizing culture.
And then immediately after that, I tried to acquire another film, and it didn't move the needle for us at all. Kind of same budget range, also an acquisition, a licensing deal, didn't move the needle for us. So now we have to actually go into production on something, and we made an overall deal with Dallas, and we produced Terror on the Prairie with Gina Carano. And it did very well for us.
But I sort of learned by then, well, you've got to continue to...
I sort of learned this from Elon Musk, and it's that in a certain kind of company, this isn't true for every company, like you couldn't do this if you had an accounting firm. But in certain kinds of companies, part of what you're selling to the audience is a vision for what the future can be. The Daily Wire was saying to our audience, there is a future where conservatives aren't losing. There's a future where we have political power and cultural power. And if you look at Jeremy's Razors and some of the things we did in consumer goods, we're also represented in the consumer goods space, where every single company isn't against you all the time. And as you sell that vision to the audience, the vision has to be ahead of where you are because it has to inspire.
Elon's great at this. Elon's, you know, I'm sure you've got a deposit in on a Roadster or whatever, the Tesla Roadster. I've got a deposit on you. When are we going to get it? I don't know. Do you think he's going to give it to you? Yeah, because that's the other thing you have to do. You have to deliver on those promises. So you're always making a promise that's a little further ahead than where you are. And you can keep that going as long as you come up, come along behind it and deliver. So we sold the Gina Carano movie before we made it. And then we made it, and it was good. We sold the kids' platform, Binky, before we made it. And then we released it.

**Patrick Bet-David** (3:37)
The model is, if you want us to do this, come help us support this? Or what is the sequence?

**SPEAKER_3** (3:41)
Well, we never used support because we didn't think of it as, we don't want people to think of it as donations. It's a for-profit business, but it is like, come alongside us and help us build the future. Your subscription gets you everything that we are, but your subscription is also going to get you the things that we will be as a result of your subscription. And so same with Pen Dragon. We told the audience about Pen Dragon, you know, when we first acquired the rights.