Fox Faith
Check out the NY Times article chronicling the latest in Hollywood’s attempts to cash in on the Christian film-going audience. In this article, NYT reports that 20th Century Fox has unveiled a new division, FoxFaith, that will release up to a dozen religious-oriented films each year: “Many of the films, with budgets ranging from about $3 million to $20 million each, will be released straight to DVD. But the studio said that at least six a year would be released nationally in theaters by an independent distributor working with Fox, starting on Oct. 6 with Love’s Abiding Joy, a western based on the novel by the Christian writer Janette Oke about a couple facing the trials of life on the American frontier.” “What we’re trying to do is create great movies that are story-driven, that happen to tap into Christian values,” said Simon Swart, the general manager of Fox’s North American home entertainment division. “The genesis of the FoxFaith banner is that it’s a Good Housekeeping seal, a marketing umbrella for these pictures, so that people can have confidence the movies won’t violate their core beliefs.”
The article also reports that the new division is the “biggest concerted effort by a major Hollywood studio to seek out films that will feed what many see as a growing, and underserved, Christian audience.” The market for faith-based films is growing and Hollywood is seeing it. The move reflects the growing weight of evangelical Christians in popular culture. It is the latest in a series of incremental steps taken by Hollywood studios in recent years to capitalize on the Christian audience.
The Walt Disney Company has gone after the Christian audience on a more ambitious scale, and successfully courted that audience ahead of the release of its big-budget epic “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe” last December. That film, which the studio showed to religious leaders ahead of the release because of its Christian themes, took in $744 million at the worldwide box office.
In another sign of the times, a veteran Hollywood executive turned evangelical Christian, David Kirkpatrick, has founded Good News Holdings, a Christian media company that, among other projects, is developing a film based on the Anne Rice novel “Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt,” slated for production next year. A spokesman said he had no studio partner at the moment.
The article also gives us more info on the $20 million Esther-epic One Night with the King : the film will be released on Oct. 13 “in about 900 theaters, with Fox booking a few dozen of them. Fox will also distribute the DVD of the film, which does not have an overtly Christian point of view, around Easter and the Jewish holiday of Purim, which commemorates the ancient tale.”
