With its superhero movies and predictable sequels no longer attracting crowds, Hollywood is finally noticing the films that actually are attracting crowds and money: high-quality, faith-based fare like Sound of Freedom, The Chosen, and Jesus Revolution.
This is no longer solely a crowd-sourcing phenomenon. Now some big studios and big directors are planning to get in on the action. Moreover, the number of movies that are not explicitly religious but have positive moral and redemptive content is also up dramatically.
This is the subject of the cover story in the latest Newsweek, entitled Jesus Takes Hollywood. It gives some fascinating information about those three recent movies. Most faith-based films were made apart from the Hollywood film industry, raising money through small donations and doing the production with small companies.
But some of the movies made that way have been among the most successful of all time if you go by the metric of “box office as a multiple of budget” (how much the movie took in factored against how much it cost to make). Paul Bond, who wrote the Newsweek story, cites the record of Sherwood Pictures, a ministry of Sherwood Baptist Church in Georgia. In 2006 it made Facing the Giants for $100,000; the football drama brought in $10.6 million. In 2006, the church made Fireproof for $500,000, which made 67 times that amount ($33,456,317).
Meanwhile, the production values–the writing, acting, and cinematography–keep getting better. as is especially evident in The Chosen, the video series about the life of Christ, which has now been seen by 110 million viewers.
And now the big players are moving in. MGM, 21st Century Fox, and Sony Pictures have opened their own faith-based studios. And two of the most acclaimed directors, Terrence Malick and Martin Scorsese, both of whom are professing Christians, are planning movies about Jesus. Scorsese attempted that once before with the controversial Last Temptation of Christ, but the director, an observant Catholic, has reportedly told the pope that this one will be more reverent.
Bond quotes Christian author Ted Baehr, who has been monitoring moral and spiritual issues in the movie industry for decades: “There’s a tremendously powerful movement toward Jesus right now that most people aren’t aware of,” he says. “The nature of man is to be hostile to Christianity and to salvation. But there’s more and more people in Hollywood moving in the other direction.”
Baehr’s publication Movieguide, which assesses movies according to a strict Christian standard, bears that out. The percentage of films with “positive Christian/redemptive content” was just 10% in 1991. In 2022, the percentage, which includes secular films with a moral impact like Top Gun: Maverick, was 59%.
The Newsweek article says that the public’s interest in religious fare is not limited to movies and streaming TV. Sales of religion-themed books reached 20.1 million in the first six months of 2023, which is 23% higher than the same period in 2020.
The irony, of course, is the great interest in Christian movies at the very time that interest in the Christian church seems to be at an all time low.
As we have blogged about, many Americans who, as they say, “identify” as Christians and even as evangelicals no longer go to church. And the evangelical ethos of faith being a “personal relationship with Jesus” can encourage that. Why do I need a church if the sacraments are just symbolic, I can interpret the Bible for myself, and I don’t need any authorities, creeds, or traditions? Going to church can be a pain and a bother. But going to a Christian movie or reading a Christian book can be a pleasant substitute.
And yet church-going Christians still constitute nearly a third (32%) of Americans. That’s a big market.
Hollywood’s problem is that lots of people have stopped going to movies. A study from last year found that 41% of those surveyed said they rarely go to the movies, with 18% saying they never do. That comes to 59% of the general public that have lost their interest in movie theaters. Part of the reason, surely, is competition from streaming services, which simply package and deliver films in a different way, which faith-based projects are also taking advantage of. But the shrunken market means that the 32% of church-goers can have an outsized impact when they decide to go to the movies.
The marketplace provides a mechanism for Christians’ cultural influence. Newsweek quotes Mark Sourian, the head of production for The Chosen:
“There’s all sorts of negative notions about Christians in Hollywood, but there’s no stronger argument to dispel those notions than success. . . .Everyone in Hollywood will become a Christian if there’s money in it.”
That’s cynical, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Of course the big studios are getting into “faith-based” filmmaking to make money, not because they are embracing the cause of faith. But if a large enough public patronizes positive films–not just explicitly religious movies but those with a strong moral compass–and, importantly, do not patronize morally corrupting films, of course there will be more positive films.
Not just Christians but just about everybody is finding Sound of Freedom, the story of a man’s crusade against child sex trafficking, inspiring. On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 70% of the critics gave it a positive review (a remarkably good number for a faith-based film), but 99% of the public did.
Just about everybody is bored with the same old formulas repeated ad nauseam. And times are too hard for bleak, depressing, and degraded material to be enjoyed as entertainment, unlike the rebellious Sixties. So exciting, involving, and inspiring movies that mean something will attract audiences.
Yes, there is still an antipathy for Christians in Hollywood, as with the rest of our cultural elite, despising Christianity for its stance on homosexuality, gender, and fornication. Still, if you watch a movie or a streaming show and one of the characters is carrying a Bible, he will likely turn out to be the bad guy.
But it may be that the climate is changing. “Some of the faithful are hoping that the renewed interest in Jesus in the mass market could also prompt a revival in faith,” observes Bond. Indeed, movies can be a way of reaching people who never go to church.
Bond quotes Craig Detweiler, president of the Wedgewood Circle, which funds religious media: “There’s a deep hunger for spiritually significant stories rooted in eternal questions of life and death, and life after death.” The pandemic only intensified that hunger and that need. “Jesus has always been in the public domain,” he adds. “It’s the intellectual property that God has shared with the world.”
Photo: Jesus at Wedding with Kids, Episode 5 of The Chosen. by The Chosen press photos (press.thechosen.tv) – https://www.press.thechosen.tv/?pgid=judjmpl7-c1493a39-5527-4ff7-bdc5-8439d32fbfdc, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93752539
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