Faith-based films like Miracles from Heaven build followings at the American box office
A growing segment of Hollywood is making religious films and increasing sales by asking pastors and religious leaders to promote their products
In the weeks before the American opening of Sony Pictures’ Miracles from Heaven, producer DeVon Franklin flew to churches around the country to screen the inspirational Jennifer Garner film about a young girl diagnosed with a rare medical condition.
At one gathering of 400 people in Baltimore, he says, audience members responded to the film by sharing their own stories of healing and loss. One woman took the microphone to talk about her son who was shot to death four years ago.
“This is why I’ve dedicated my life to making stories like this,” says Franklin, a Christian and former Columbia Pictures executive who has a production deal with Sony. “It’s more than a ticket sale at the box office. It becomes real-life ministry.”
Faith-based films are a growing, often profitable segment of the entertainment industry, and more producers and executives are trying to tap into the market. The 2015 prayer-focused hit War Room cost just US$3 million to make but grossed US$67.8 million at the box office. Miracles from Heaven and the biblical epic Risen have generated strong business despite opening only a few weeks apart.
Each of those films was produced by Sony’s faith-based division, Affirm Films.
And there’s plenty more to come. A sequel to the 2014 indie drama God’s Not Dead opened in the US on April 1 from production company Pure Flix. Paramount Pictures is preparing to unleash its new version of Ben-Hur, co-produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, as a big-budget summer hit slated for August.
“Hollywood is still learning,” says Chris Stone, founder of the Christian advocacy group Faith Driven Consumer, which says 17 per cent of Americans make purchasing decisions primarily based on their religious beliefs. “The community is hungry for content, and there’s very little content that is strictly made for them.”
Box-office prognosticators routinely underestimate the pull of such movies, partly because they tend to draw people who don’t often go to see films in cinemas.
“It’s easy to put these films on the side,” says Paul Dergarabedian, box-office analyst at ComScore. “But it’s hard to ignore movies that are this successful on a regular basis. I feel like this genre is really coming into its own.”
But that’s starting to change.
The bigger Hollywood names have helped to broaden the audience for Christian films, boosting their box-office appeal.
Heaven Is for Real, starring Greg Kinnear, caught Tinseltown off guard with its US$91 million in domestic ticket sales, and Miracles From Heaven grossed US$18 million in its first five days, exceeding the studio’s projections.
“The craft is getting better within this space,” says Rich Peluso, head of Affirm Films. “If someone had sat me down 10 years ago and said you’re going to be working with Dennis Quaid, Jennifer Garner and Patricia Riggen, I would have said you’re insane.”
The company takes pains to meet with pastors to see if they’re comfortable promoting the movies to their congregations. For some releases, Affirm and its advertising agencies even distribute sermon notes and discussion guides for small Bible study groups. Multiple churches held their own screenings for Miracles from Heaven, including One Church Los Angeles.
One Church bought out two screens at the AMC Century City for members of the congregation to see it for free, in place of the church’s traditional Wednesday night worship service.
“We went to that film praying that it was something we could be proud of,” One Church pastor Toure Roberts said. “We were very pleased to see that it was a great movie that also happened to have a faith-based message.”
Studios and cinemas have benefited from selling tickets in bulk to places of worship. Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ grossed US$370 million in the US and Canada, in part thanks to churches that bussed the faithful to cinemas. But religiously inclined marketers have become more digitally adept since then. A Web page for Miracles from Heaven encouraged people to share their photos of loved ones, and the movie got social media boosts.
“I didn’t approach the material from the religious point of view,” she says. “I approached it more as a spiritual and inspiring story.”
Not all Christian movies score at the multiplex. Affirm’s family comedy Moms’ Night Out faltered in 2014. More recently, Focus Features’ offering The Young Messiah, the Hayden Christensen drama 90 Minutes in Heaven, and the Kate Mara thriller Captive all failed to break out.
Biblical adaptations can be especially risky for studios, which have to be careful to market their movies to churchgoers without pandering. Filmmakers can sometimes run afoul of Christian advocates by appearing to take liberties with the source material, a problem Paramount encountered with Darren Aronofsky’s Noah.
But others resonate with Christian audiences. That was the case for Bryan Schwartz, a Christian minister, former NFL player and father of seven, who took his family to see Miracles from Heaven and used it as a way to talk to his kids about faith.
“We got to reinforce what we believe – that God is alive and still doing miracles today,” he says.
Miracles from Heaven opens in Hong Kong on April 7
Los Angeles Times