Two weeks ago, I quoted a couple of news stories which said that the way to sell movies to the Christian market is to go after pastors, and to let their congregations follow along like cattle.
Now, it looks like the studios are really going out of their way to curry the favour of these leaders, based on this e-mail that FoxFaith sent to Greg Linscott, a self-professed “Fundamentalist Baptist pastor” who runs CurrentChristian.com:
Movies are like no other art form. It is the one medium you can experience where you can literally lose your identity. You can laugh with a character, cry with them, worry with them. That’s why so many people are so careful about the movies they watch. We understand that as a pastor, there are movies out there that are in parallel with your value system that you may want to support, if you could only see the film before it came out in theaters.
Together, Fox Faith and DirecTV have come up with a solution. We want to give you a chance to see the movie via satellite. If you are a church and want this, they will install a Satellite system in your church for free and give you basic service for free as well. There are no strings attached. We believe this really solves the problem. After you have the satellite, we’ll let you know when the Fox Faith screenings will take place and what channel it will be on. You will be able to view the movie before it comes to theaters over a virtual private network.
Linscott goes on to suggest that this is a “bribe”. Picking up on this theme, Chris at Movie Marketing Madness writes:
This is pretty egregious. Churches exist – at least in theory – to bring people closer to God, not bring people closer to Hollywood. It’s great that more movies are being churned out that are supposed to appeal to the faithful but giving people something huge like this is a pretty clear sign of expecting some sort of quid pro quo.
Make of all that what you will. Me, I’m wondering if the idea behind this is to let pastors watch movies more or less privately, before giving their opinion of those movies to their parishioners, or if it is to get entire congregations to watch movies in the sanctuary.
I also wonder if FoxFaith will have any way of “checking” to see if the pastor has been making any use of their system, similar to how we movie critics sometimes have to send tearsheets or weblinks to movie publicists — just to let them know that, yes, we do write reviews of the movies that they show us in advance for free.
And I also wonder if FoxFaith will use this hook-up to promote only the specifically evangelical movies on their plate (Thr3e, One Night with the King, etc.), or if they will also use it to promote regular theatrical releases that they deem “family-friendly”.
Heck, given that they hired Christian publicists to promote recent flicks like that remake of The Omen (1976), and given that other Fox films like X2: X-Men United (2002) have featured prominent Christian characters, who knows, they might even use it to promote regular films that aren’t so obviously “family” oriented.
Hmmm. I write reviews for a Christian website in the United States, but I live in Canada, and Fox is threatening to withhold its films from Canadian theatres. Maybe if I knew the right kind of pastors, I could still watch Fox films in advance of their American release dates, and still file my reviews on time. Hmmm.
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