With “Jesus Revolution”, the believers are back in their cinema seats

Look at it Jesus Revolution over $45 million in Lionsgate ticket sales – matching or besting The Fables, Banshees of Inisherin, tar, women talk And triangle of sorrow, combined – it finally seems safe to say. 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 photos are overtly religious, as with Jesus Revolution, the true story of a preacher and his countercultural followers in the 1970s. Others are just ambitious – moralistic, value-laden stories, like Creed III or Respectabout people striving to become more and better than they already are.

Either way, the Uplift business has struggled so far Top Gun: Maverick has broken through on a strictly secular level in recent years. It was apparently the last explicitly religious film to earn more than $40 million at the box office breakthroughby Fox, in 2019. In 2021, mostly dark fantasies—Spider-Man: No Way Home, Poison: Let there be carnage, black widow– ruled. (Albeit quite inspiring, but without a box office KODA sneaked into the Oscars.)

Anyway, it’s nice to have the loyal crowd back in their seats.

Before the Great Prohibition and the accompanying socio-political outbursts over abortion and gender identity issues, left-wing Hollywood seemed to find common ground with more right-wing religious conservatives, who are a mainstay of the inspiration market.

Early 2016 while still reporting for The New York Times, I actually spent several months mapping the often hidden interface between conventional film companies and these tens of millions of mostly Christian, faith-based viewers. In a fortuitous partnership with fellow reporter Brooks Barnes—although the obsession was mine—I poured out quite a bit of energy and Time Capital to meet dozens of people who quietly tried to reconcile movies and spiritual matters.

It was a fascinating tour. I remember having lunch with the rather secular producer Joe Roth, who explained that when a film is shot as miracles from heavenHe didn’t have to believe what his associates believed, but he had to believe it his believed. A few days later, I spoke with Roth’s co-producer Bishop TD Jakes, who was stunned to learn that Roth had once been the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that banned prayer in schools. They had too much in common to worry about their differences.

The most interesting agents were those hired by studios to find and promote faith-based values ​​in so-called religious mainstream films such as Frozen, cloudy, Hidden numbers or Twelve years as a slave. Even a movie as unlikely as Room, about the captivity of a kidnapped woman, had its campaign of faith. Until culture boiled over with the 2016 election, movies mattered to religious audiences, and those audiences mattered to the movies.

The Time Project, intended as a three-part series, more or less imploded when I left the paper in the summer of 2016. Brooks took up the subject and wrote a beautiful piece which was published on 25 December that year (with, as I recall, an illustration featuring a curiously incongruous Christmas Day crucifix).

As for the producers and consultants who built bridges—Roth, DeVon Franklin, Corby Pons, Marshall Mitchell, Jonathan Bock, Matthew Faraci, Ted Baehr, and others—they did not evaporate. You can still find most of them with a simple Google search that does the same job.

But they seemed to back off a bit and quiet down as the films got darker, angrier and less inspiring.

Maybe until now. When the faithful are back on the theater seats, amen. Some increase is good.