With ‘Jesus Revolution,’ The Faithful Are Back In Their Movie Theater Pews
19.03.2023 - 18:51
/ deadline.com
Watching Jesus Revolution surge past $45 million in ticket sales for Lionsgate—matching or besting The Fabelmans, The Banshees Of Inisherin, Tár, Women Talking and Triangle Of Sadness, combined—it finally seems safe to say it. The faith-based audience is back.
Between Covid and the culture wars, it’s been a rough few years for those who make, promote and/or enjoy what are loosely called inspirational films. Sometimes the pictures are overtly religious, as with Jesus Revolution, the real-life story of a pastor and his counter-cultural following in the 1970s. Others are simply aspirational—moralistic, values-laden tales, like Creed III or Respect, about individuals striving to be more and better than they already are.
Either way, the uplift business was having tough time until Top Gun: Maverick broke through, at the strictly secular level, last year. The last explicitly religious film to top $40 million at the box office appears to have been Breakthrough, from Fox, in 2019. In 2021, especially, darker fantasies—Spider-Man: No Way Home, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Black Widow—prevailed. (Though the fairly inspirational but box office-deprived CODA slipped into the Oscars.)
Anyway, it’s nice to have the faith crowd back in seats.
Before the great lockdown and simultaneous socio-political eruptions over issues like abortion and gender identity, left-leaning Hollywood had seemed to be finding common ground with more right-leaning religious conservatives who are a mainstay of the inspiration market.
In early 2016, while still reporting for The New York Times, I actually spent several months trying to map the often hidden interface between conventional movie companies and those tens of millions of mostly Christian,