“When it comes to box office returns, God is good and only getting better.”
That’s the conclusion of Bloomberg Businessweek reported David Walters, who recently posted an article about the new popularity of Christian films.
Walters reports that Christian films are experiencing a resurgence after a fallow period of several decades. Faith-based films like “The 10 Commandments” and “Ben-Hur” were hugely popular in the 1950s – “The 10 Commandments” is, adjusted for inflation, the sixth-highest grossing domestic movie of all time – but interest in the genre cooled off until Mel Gibson’s 2004 “The Passion of the Christ,” which grossed over $600 million on a $30 million budget.
Walters observes that in 2016 a new crop of Christian films such as “Miracles from Heaven” and “Risen” are doing well at the box office:
Industry watchers assumed that Miracles and Risen would earn money slowly and steadily leading up to the Easter holiday. Instead, they surged in their opening weekends. Risen out-earned buzzy horror flick The Witch and Jesse Owens biopic Race, trailing only Marvel’s Deadpool and DreamWorks Pictures’ Kung Fu Panda 3. Miracles recouped its $13 million production budget in just four days, knocking the J.J. Abrams-produced 10 Cloverfield Lane out of the top three earners for the week. Explain it however you want: savvy positioning or divine intervention. But when it comes to box office returns, God is good and only getting better.
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