![]() 25 of that year (with, as I recall, an illustration that featured a weirdly incongruous Christmas Day crucifix).Īs for the producers and consultants who had been building bridges-Roth, DeVon Franklin, Corby Pons, Marshall Mitchell, Jonathan Bock, Matthew Faraci, Ted Baehr and others-they didn’t evaporate. Brooks picked up the theme, and wrote a fine piece, which was published on Dec. The Times project, intended as a three-part series, more or less imploded when I left the paper in the summer of 2016. Until the culture boiled over with the 2016 election, movies were important to the religious audience, and that audience was important to the movies. Even a film as unlikely as Room, about the close confinement of a kidnapped woman, had its faith campaign. The most interesting operatives were those being hired by studios to find and promote faith-aligned values in seemingly areligious mainstream films like Frozen, Sully, Hidden Figures or Twelve Years A Slave. They had too much common ground to worry about their differences. Jakes, who was stunned to learn that Roth had once been a plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that banned school prayer. A few days later, I spoke with Roth’s fellow producer Bishop T. I remember having lunch with the quite secular producer Joe Roth, who explained that in making a film like Miracles From Heaven, he didn’t have to believe what his collaborators believed, but he had to believe that they believed. Working in loose partnership with fellow reporter Brooks Barnes-though the obsession was mine-I invested a fair amount of energy and Times capital in getting to know dozens of people who were quietly trying to reconcile movies and matters of the spirit. ![]() 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, faith-oriented viewers. (Though the fairly inspirational but box office-deprived CODA slipped into the Oscars.)Īnyway, it’s nice to have the faith crowd back in seats.īefore 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 2021, especially, darker fantasies- Spider-Man: No Way Home, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Black Widow-prevailed. The last explicitly religious film to top $40 million at the box office appears to have been Breakthrough, from Fox, in 2019. New Lionsgate Studios Atlanta Rising In Latest Partnership With Robert Halmi's Great PointĮither way, the uplift business was having tough time until Top Gun: Maverick broke through, at the strictly secular level, last year.
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