Announcing Paid Subscriptions & Other Updates

Launching a new subscriber tier - and why we are doing it

Hello everyone! We want to thank all of you for the amazing support and enthusiasm you have shown lately for 100 Movies Every Catholic Should See. When we started this blog two years ago, we never could have imagined the awesome community that would spring up around this project, or that so many people would appreciate our writing and gravitate towards this subject. Catholicism and movies are our passions, and we are delighted and grateful to find so many awesome people that share those passions! Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for all the love and support you’re shown us so far in our mission to spread the Gospel through film and film criticism. Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam.

With the amount of growth we’ve seen in the past couple months, we have been discussing where we want to go from here. We completed our first major goal (The List) and we’ve got plenty of other projects we want to tackle. As we prayed about and discussed our next steps, we decided that we are now ready to take on more ambitious projects and go from just criticizing films to actually making them. We also want to grow our podcast and bring you more amazing film discussion, as well as revive our Youtube channel and reach new audiences there.

Writing articles and posting them on Substack is fairly cheap; these other endeavors, however, come with costs. Therefore we come before you like the medicants of old to humbly ask you to support us monetarily. We looked at various other support platforms, but the built-in tools on Substack seem to have everything we need to provide some extra perks and benefits to our subscribers while keeping all our endeavors streamlined and minimizing the amount of platforms our audience will have to navigate. If you are able to support us, we greatly appreciate your generosity and hope to repay you, if not with better essays and art then at least with our prayers. If you are not able to support us right now, don’t worry! We are not throwing everything behind a paywall, and you will still get our essays, podcasts, and videos that you are currently used to getting for free. We hope this will be a new and exciting chapter in the 100 Movies Every Catholic Should See and Reconquista Media adventure, and we are blessed and grateful to all of you who are able to join us on our quest to conquer the media landscape for Christ!

What will paid subscribers get?

• We will be reviving the Weekly Watches series, so every Wednesday our supporters will get mini-reviews from 3-5 of our authors about the films they have discovered this week (starting this very afternoon!).

• We will also be reviving the Deep Dives and Underrated Gems series, and have plans for other in depth reviews of classic films which have not made the list. These will be available to our supporters only.

• Paid subscribers will get one week early access to our podcast, which will be posted for supporters here on Substack before it hits Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and other platforms.

• In the next month, we will be creating a Discord chatroom for our supporters. This will be a place to meet other Catholic cinephiles, hang out, discuss movies, and generally have a great time.

• We plan to have a monthly hangout livestream, either on Substack, Youtube, or Discord, where our paid supporters can ask us questions, bring certain movies to our attention, suggest essay and podcast topics and guests, get a sneak peak at what comes next, etc.

• Supporters will have access to our entire back catalog of essays and posts. Our goal was always to eventually turn The List into a book, and in talking to publishers it seems that we may need to put those essays behind the paywall eventually to get published. For now, The List posts will remain free to all, but the Critics Corner reviews and our other essays will go into the archive after they have been published for six weeks.

• Our undying gratitude and prayers.

What will remain free?

• Our weekly 100 More Movies posts will always be released for free, and will remain so at least for the first six weeks after publication.

• All of our new movie reviews will be released for free. We want as many Catholics as possible to make informed choices about the media they are considering watching.

• The podcast and Youtube videos will also remain free to all, although our supporters will get early access.

What will we do with the money?

We want to upgrade and expand every facet of our project here. We’re not simply going to pay for Sam, Joe, and Cameron to take a White Lotus-inspired trip to Bali; we’re not even planning on making this our full time job. Every penny that we are given will go straight back into providing high quality Catholic media and media criticism for you, our audience.

First, on Substack. Subscriptions will allow us to reimburse our writers for movie tickets, so we plan on publishing even more movie reviews for theatrical and streaming new releases. In the past, we’ve only been able to publish a review if one of our writers was already interested and planning on seeing a film, so there will be fewer releases that we miss due to lack of writer interest. If we hit certain revenue targets, we would eventually like to start paying our writers as well. Our writers are all amazing and committed to our mission, and we would like in justice to repay them for their good work once it is financially feasible to do so.

Secondly, the podcast and Youtube. Subscriptions will allow us to upgrade our sound equipment so the podcast and Youtube videos sound less echo-y and more professional. We will be able to provide our amazing video editor with more tools to do interesting things on both of these platforms, and overall upgrade the caliber of our audio and video productions. We may also be able to bring guests in to have in-person podcasts and collaborations, which would be awesome. Having now done both in-person and remote podcasts, I can’t overstate how much more personable and interesting an in-person conversation is, both for those talking and those listening, so we hope to be able to do more of that in the future.

Thirdly, Catholic film production. It has always been a dream of ours to be able to create great films from a Catholic perspective, and we are starting to take steps to make that dream a reality. We have, in fact, already finished one short film which we hope to share with you in the near future. It was a one-weekend, no-budget production as sort of a proof of concept that we could work together as a team, and we couldn’t be more proud of what we were able to accomplish. We already have other shorts in the works and, if we can get the funding, experience, and collaborators, production of feature films is in our moderate-to-long term plans. This is where I truly hope some of you will be convinced to support us; we have a dream to pull together some of the awesome Catholic people who are doing great work in the film industry and create a studio which will put out films which aim at the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in every aspect of production and story-telling. Filmmaking is a collaborative and expensive art, and so most of the money we raise through subscriptions will be squirreled away to try and accomplish this big dream of ours.

Conclusion

Once again, we would like to thank each and every one of our readers for their support and enthusiasm for 100 Movies Every Catholic Should See. We feel blessed beyond belief to have such a community of Catholic cinephiles to share our love for film with. Whether or not you choose to support us, know that we value and appreciate you and plan to continue writing, podcasting, and filmmaking for you as long as the Lord wills we do so. We thank you for joining us on this amazing adventure, and we promise to be good stewards of any support you are able to send our way. We look forward to the next steps on our journey and hope to be able to bring even more amazing, high-quality writing and art to you in the future! May God bless you and keep you, and grant you his peace.

Joe Wilson, Sam Morales, and Cameron DeLaFleur, editors and co-founders
Reconquista Media and 100 Movies Every Catholic Should See