Terry Mattingly’s latest column for the Scripps Howard News Service looks at what happened to The Ultimate Gift, which came to theatres back in March and is now out on DVD:

There were other reviews, good and bad. Still, the nastiness in strategic corners of the media caught veteran producer Rick Eldridge off guard, in large part because he thought that he was producing a mainstream movie, with mainstream talent, that was going to have a chance to reach a thoroughly mainstream audience.

What he didn’t count on was getting stuck with two dangerous labels — “Fox” and “Faith.” Those words can turn your average media insider into a pillar of salt.

That’s what happened to “The Ultimate Gift,” turning this quiet cinematic fable into a cautionary tale for others who want to make movies that can appeal to viewers in Middle America, including folks who frequent sanctuary pews.

“I really felt this story had strong values that would hit home with the general market,” said Eldridge, who is now pushing to promote the DVD of his movie. “I thought this was a moral-message film, but I was determined to make a movie that would speak to a wide spectrum of people. … Then we got pigeon-holed into this little ‘Christian’ niche that really limited who would get much of a chance to see this movie.”

The pivotal moment was when this 20th Century Fox project was moved to the new Fox Faith division, which meant “The Ultimate Gift” was sent to theaters with all kinds of faith-based strings attached. As the Fox Faith Web site bluntly stated: “To be part of Fox Faith, a movie has to have overt Christian content or be derived from the work of a Christian author.”

Thus, mainstream critics were determined to find the moral messages and make sure potential moviegoers were warned in advance. This also meant that mainstream performers such as Academy Award nominee James Garner, veteran character actor Brian Dennehy and the young actress Abigail Breslin of “Little Miss Sunshine” discovered that they were — surprise, surprise — starring in a “Christian movie.” . . .

There is no need to deny that the movie contains religious and moral themes, said Eldridge. But for generations, Hollywood executives made successful mainstream movies that contained these kinds of words and images. These movies were aimed at a broad, mainstream market, not a narrow, political, sectarian, “Christian” niche.

“I told the Fox people this movie was going to resonate with the Christian audience and that’s fine with me, because I am a Christian,” said Eldridge. “But I was worried that this movie would get tagged as a little ‘Christian’ movie, like that was some kind of Good Housekeeping seal for the Christian marketplace. …

“I think it’s obvious that this is what happened and that caused some people to distance themselves from this movie. There was no need for that to happen.”

For what it’s worth, Fox Faith Movies has not released any new movies theatrically since The Ultimate Gift. The website still lists two movies as “coming soon”, but one of them recently went straight to TV, while the other one was originally scheduled for an Easter release and has since been put on indefinite hold.

In fairness, it is not only Fox Faith that has had to deal with the problem of turning away audiences simply because they target the Christian niche. Recent box-office disappointments such as New Line’s The Nativity Story (2006) and Universal’s Evan Almighty also quite possibly turned away as many people as they might have attracted, precisely because it was perceived that those films were catering to the churchgoing crowd. More and more, it makes sense that the makers of The Chronicles of Narnia (2005) made a point of downplaying their own film’s Christian connections.

AUG 26 UPDATE: Mattingly’s column is now archived here, too.

Carmen Andres at In the Open Space notes that the Fox Faith Movies website now lists a film called The Final Inquiry that is due to come out April 6, i.e. on Good Friday. No films with that title are currently listed at the IMDB, but the plot synopsis — the Roman emperor sends an agent to Palestine to disprove rumours of Jesus’ resurrection — sounds an awful lot like that remake of The Inquiry that premiered in Italy just before New Year’s Day.

FEB 14 UPDATE: I just got a screener from FoxFaith, and yup, it’s the same film! In fact, the title onscreen is simply The Inquiry.

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.