Inspire Studios

Hollywood Economics 101

It's a crazy fact that just 50 movie production companies make the pictures earning 80% of the whole world's motion picture income. Most of these we all know and love.

So what are the successful producers doing differently?

And, more importantly, can you get in on it?

After working over 30 years on dozens of studio-released movie and TV projects, our advising team understands by experience the processes used by the most successful indie movie production companies. (Shoot…they even wrote the book on it!) We are ready to make our own – and need your help. Our opportunity is also yours.

The dream began for me as a boy

Growing up in the Philippines, I have always enjoyed asking questions and listening to the war experiences of the World War II veterans in my hometown. My Filipino-Chinese ancestry afforded with me great inspiring heroic stories. After years of working and traveling in many countries around the world, I found myself captivated by local cultural heroes such as Dr. Sun Yat Sen of China, Mahatma Gandhi of India, Nelson Mandela of Africa and many others. I always believed that the movie business is the most strategic platform to show the world the powerfully inspiring lives of extra-ordinary individuals amongst us to help bring about true and lasting change in our societies and the world. Movies have intrinsic power to influence human beings towards change that is: love what is good, pursue what is true, and live what is noble.

                                                                                                        -Francis Lara Ho, founder

First, we put together a Dream team

In 2018 we launched Inspire Studios, the first and only Hollywood-Philippines film company to produce major studio-level movies for global distribution based on incredible true stories with added never before seen features. 

Manny “Pacman” Pacquiao: FREEDOM FIGHTERS' global celebrity Co-Producer
We have attached global boxing icon Manny “Pacman” Pacquiao, considered one of the greatest professional boxers of all time and a Senator of the Philippines since 2016, as a co-producer in our first film, Freedom Fighters. Manny will also play a supporting Filipino role.

We attached as a key role in our first film as well as an executive producer Cesar Montano, a Hall of Fame awardee actor, director, and producer in the Philippines. (Montano also is an internationally acclaimed actor and played the lead Filipino guerrilla role in Miramax’s WWII movie, The Great Raid).


John Shepherd: FREEDOM FIGHTERS' Executive Producer
Shepherd has 25+ years of experience in independent filmmaking as a producer and a studio executive. He consults for several film funds including Starlings Capital, Starlings’ Academy Award® winning ROCKETMAN, co-financed with Paramount, has generated nearly $200M in WWBO on a 40M budget.

As the Founder and President of Steve McEveety’s Mpower Pictures, Shepherd produced SNOWMEN (Winner – Dallas Film Festival, Tribeca Audience Award, Toronto International Film Festival “Sprockets” award) THE STONING OF SORAYA M (Winner – Los Angeles Film Festival, Runner up Toronto, NAACP Image Award, Berlin Cinema of Peace) AN AMERICAN CAROL (David Zucker) as well as overseeing Mpower involvement in BELLA (Winner – Toronto Film Festival), MACHINE GUN PREACHER (Gerard Butler) and most recently MAN DOWN (Shia LeBeouf, Gary Oldman, Kate Mara), which he also Executive Produced. Through his shingle SDG Pictures, John produced the Heartland Film Festival audience award winner EMANUEL – with Stephan Curry’s Unanimous Media and Viola Davis’ JuVee productions. Other notable titles include Flesh and Blood, Putin, The Dating Project, The Dropbox, Irreplaceable, The Ultimate Gift and Stroke of Genius.

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John Lee: FREEDOM FIGHTERS' Global Distribution & Funding Strategist
Since 1976, John has negotiated, bought, and sold movies in the major markets, acquired screenplays and movie rights to novels, and basically managed or performed every other business function of the film industry. Taken together he provided business services for over 20 studio films and network television series and specials with combined production costs of over $470 million and global rights earnings exceeding $4 billion. 

A press conference in the Philippines (left to right: Hall of Fame actor Cesar Montano, advisor John Lee, and Francis Ho, founder of Inspire Studios)

Additionally, our veteran Entertainment Attorney Richard Morse has two decades of experience encompassing specialized business and legal affairs services in all aspects of entertainment, arts, sports, and new media, with a primary emphasis in film. Rick has served as Sr. VP of Business and Legal Affairs for Radar Pictures, the successor company to Interscope Communications known for a myriad of critically acclaimed and box office successes such as "The Last Samurai", "Mr. Holland's Opus", and the reboot "Jumanji.”

Next we developed scripts and business relationships

We raised $1.7M of our $2M development budget from private investors for our first picture, Freedom Fighters. We set up our relationship with the completion guarantor and the bank for production financing the $50M production budget. After dozens of drafts, our Freedom Fighters script is ready.

FREEDOM FIGHTERS' Multi-awarded Hollywood Screenwriter...

Cyrus Nowrasteh, a multi-award winning Hollywood filmmaker has completed our world-class Freedom Fighters screenplay. CYRUS is a director, screenwriter, and producer, who has worked in both film and TV and is credited on over 100 hours of produced material. He began his career as a screenwriter and wrote scripts for Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone, Chris Columbus, William Friedkin, and numerous other Hollywood
luminaries. An award-winning filmmaker Cyrus is best known as the director and
co-writer of the highly regarded award-winning indie, The Stoning of Soraya M.
(Lionsgate 2009), and 2016 the Focus Features’ release The Young Messiah,
produced by Chris Columbus. In 2019 Nowrasteh returned to the indie world,
making the Middle East thriller, Infidel, based upon his own original script
and starring Jim Caviezel. Infidel opened September 18, 2020 on 2400 screens
nationwide and was #1 in the USA its opening weekend.

A History-in-the-Making Global Motion Picture Studio

We are making history as the first Hollywood-Philippines global studio with a vision to see our first film, Freedom Fighters (http://freedomfightersmovie.com/) as the first award-winning blockbuster movie that features a Pacific theater World War II true story out of the Philippines that's virtually unknown to the Western World. Based on the incredible true story, Freedom Fighters is the first of a slate of six global films from Inspire Studios featuring a housewife turned WWII resistance fighter who fought and ultimately help defeat the much larger Japanese Imperial Forces.

The Rescue (http://therescue-movie.com/), our second global film highlights the extraordinary courage of Filipino Scout Rangers in rescuing American missionaries from a global terrorist group directly linked to Osama Bin Ladin. 

PALAWAN: Last Man Out, our third global film tells of how emaciated American POWs together with machete-wielding Palawan Special Bolo Battalion fighters triumphantly fought the much stronger Japanese Invaders. 

1521, the fourth global film in our slate shows how a Pacific island tribal chief and his brave warriors with inferior weapons, defeated much larger global colonial empire with advanced weaponry, in an epic battle that changed the world.

THE BLACK GENERAL, the fifth global film in our slate honors an African American fighter who stand against racism and fought alongside the Philippine Revolutionary Forces during the Philippine-American War of 1899. 

OPEN DOORS, our sixth global film is based on the epic true World War II story of how the Philippine President Quezon saved more than a thousand Jews from the Holocaust.

Join us...

Would you make history with us by investing in our first film, Freedom Fighters?