Once again, a rush of excellent Christian films are reminding Hollywood executives that there’s a huge market for movies that respect Christianity and the solid family values it promotes.
Writing for Breitbart, Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D., reports that the 2004 blockbuster, The Passion of the Christ, woke up Hollywood to the fact that Christian audiences are hungry for good films – but they must be authentic to sell.
“You can’t just suddenly have executives in board rooms saying, ‘Faith-based movies are big right now so let’s do one.’ You have to come from an authentic place,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for comScore. “Those in the faith-based community will know if it’s not the real deal.”
In other words, today’s Christian is too savvy to be fooled by a Christian-in-name-only film.
And it doesn’t matter to them if the film is a big budget biblical like The Passion of the Christ. Films such as The War Room and Miracles from Heaven, which deal with the power of faith in modern settings, are also a big draw.
“Not only are more Christian films being made, they are also connecting with audiences and drawing people out to the cinema again,” Dr. Williams writes.
Last weekend, two of the top ten movies at the domestic box office dealt with explicitly Christian themes. I Can Only Imagine, starring Dennis Quaid and J. Michael Finley, came in number three at the box office after having raked in $28.1 million since it opened two weeks ago. Paul, Apostle of Christ, came in eighth after making $5 million since its March 23 opening. Although not in the top ten, God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness, the third in the series which opened on Good Friday, made an estimated $2.6 million in the nearly 1700 theaters where it was shown.
“The outstanding performance of certain faith-based films continues to baffle Hollywood executives, who seem terminally out of touch with Christian America,” Dr. Williams writes
They are not only out of touch, but they frequently shoot themselves in the foot by trying to push Christianity aside such as in the recent Disney disappointment, A Wrinkle in Time. In this film, they removed all of the biblical references which were included in the novel by Madeleine L’Engle. Although the end-product brought in a respectable $33 million in its debut, that number was far lower than what was expected and the film was plagued by negative reviews.
This led Christian film critic Justin Chang to write in the Los Angeles Times that “there is some truth to the notion that Hollywood doesn’t always know how best to serve a significant portion of its audience.”
“While many faith-based films do not stand out as runaway chart-busters, all in all they make up an ever more significant portion of the industry, with the faith-based genre reportedly earning nearly $2 billion just since the year 2000,” Williams reports.
For the most part, the success of these films is due to believers who provide plenty of free advertising in their churches and youth groups.
“You have to have that grass roots marketing for a faith-based movie to be successful,” Dergarabedian said.
This, along with a film that comes from a place of authentic faith, is teaching Hollywood a lesson it needs to learn.
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