{"id":50515,"date":"2016-07-29T14:22:24","date_gmt":"2016-07-29T21:22:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/?p=50515"},"modified":"2016-07-29T14:22:24","modified_gmt":"2016-07-29T21:22:24","slug":"is-ben-hur-in-box-office-trouble","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2016\/07\/is-ben-hur-in-box-office-trouble.html","title":{"rendered":"Is Ben-Hur<\/i> in box-office trouble?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"benhur-faithtrailer-1-a\"<\/a><\/p>\n

With tickets on sale and the release date only three weeks away, it is now possible to get a sense of how big an audience the new Ben-Hur<\/a><\/i> might have. And the news at this point isn\u2019t very encouraging, as The Hollywood Reporter<\/a><\/i> says the big-budget Bible epic is currently on track to gross only $14-15 million in its first weekend.<\/p>\n

That would actually be one of the better openings for a \u201cfaith-based\u201d movie, roughly tying Miracles from Heaven<\/a><\/i> for fourth place behind the opening weekends of Heaven Is for Real<\/a><\/i>, Son of God<\/a><\/i> and The Passion of the Christ<\/a><\/i>. But all of those films cost $30 million or less to produce, whereas Ben-Hur<\/i> reportedly has a budget of just under $100 million and is supposed to play well outside the \u201cfaith-based\u201d niche.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s particularly striking that Ben-Hur<\/i> could open so far behind the $25.6 million that Son of God<\/i> opened to in February 2014. Both films were produced and promoted by Mark Burnett and Roma Downey, but Son of God<\/i> consisted almost entirely of footage from The Bible<\/a><\/i> \u2014 a popular TV miniseries that many of the ticket-buyers already had on DVD \u2014 whereas Ben-Hur<\/i> is an all-new movie made for the big screen.<\/p>\n

The studio still has three weeks to drum up interest in Ben-Hur<\/i>, of course. And it\u2019s possible that the people who produce these \u201ctracking\u201d estimates may have a blind spot or two when it comes to the \u201cfaith-based\u201d demographic. This could also be a case, like Warcraft<\/a><\/i>, where a film flops in North America but does really well overseas.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s one other point worth noting here: Ben-Hur<\/i> is being produced by the same studio that made Noah<\/a><\/i>. That<\/i> film opened to $43.7 million and went on to gross $101.2 million in North America and another $261.4 million overseas, for a global total of $362.6 million on a production budget of $125 million. But many evangelicals didn\u2019t like Noah<\/i>, and it is widely assumed that Paramount brought Burnett and Downey into the Ben-Hur<\/i> project to help sell the film to the evangelical market. Some people have argued that Paramount teamed up with Burnett and Downey because it had \u201clearned its lesson\u201d from the Noah<\/i> experience. But if Ben-Hur<\/i> ends up grossing only a third of what Noah<\/i> did, then what lesson should Paramount learn from that<\/i>, exactly?<\/p>\n

In any case, we\u2019ll see how well Ben-Hur<\/i> actually does when it opens August 19.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Early tracking indicates that Ben-Hur<\/i> might play like a “faith-based” film — but it was budgeted to be a lot, lot bigger than that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[411,2202,19,51,63,52,1421],"class_list":["post-50515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-ben-hur","tag-ben-hur-2016","tag-box-office","tag-mark-burnett","tag-noah-2014","tag-roma-downey","tag-son-of-god"],"yoast_head":"\nIs Ben-Hur in box-office trouble?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Early tracking indicates that Ben-Hur might play like a "faith-based" film -- but it was budgeted to be a lot, lot bigger than that.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2016\/07\/is-ben-hur-in-box-office-trouble.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Is Ben-Hur in box-office trouble?\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Early tracking indicates that Ben-Hur might play like a "faith-based" film -- but it was budgeted to be a lot, lot bigger than that.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2016\/07\/is-ben-hur-in-box-office-trouble.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"FilmChat\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2016-07-29T21:22:24+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/wp.production.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/files\/2016\/07\/benhur-faithtrailer-1-a-1024x284.png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Peter T. 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