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The LA Times brings us word that Rupert Murdoch's Fox Filmed Entertainment is expected to announce plans for a Christian-only branch. Called "FoxFaith," the newly-anointed division will produce up to a dozen faith-based films a year, with distribution deals already ascending from theater giants AMC and Carmike Cinemas. Each film will have a combined production and marketing budget of under $10 million, chump change compared to the studio's average $96 million per movie ($60 million for production, $36 million for marketing). But the move marks the biggest Hollywood acknowledgement to date of the Christian right's entertainment purchasing power.
Cracks on the irony of the network that spawned Temptation Island turning to religion aside, the evangelical movement has been growing at a massive rate, with the media finally starting to pay attention. And, as constant chants of "Passion of the Christ, $371 million domestic gross" fill the Hollywood hills, studio execs can surely smell potential profits. Fox isn't alone; other studios have caught the scent, with New Line releasing The Nativity Story in December and Warner planning a film version of Milton's Paradise Lost. Hey, if The Da Vinci Code can make $218 million in the U.S., they may as well start carting all the Biblical screenplays out of storage. Just think what CGI could do for Dante's Inferno.
Still, something feels a little off here. The Christian right is considered a niche market (for the moment, anyway). So a dozen movies a year? At $10 million each? That's a pretty sizeable piece of change. What about other recently-acknowledged niches, some of them just as underrepresented and hungry for films geared towards their culture and beliefs? One glaring example: the African American community that gave Tyler Perry's Diary of a Mad Black Woman its $51 million domestic gross. A phenomenon so stunning it left everyone in Hollywood speechless, Diary was made on just $5.5 million, a fraction of Passion's $30 million production budget (though how Mel managed to rack up a $30 million bill on a 126-minute snuff film remains one of the mysteries of cinema). Perry's follow-up, Madea's Family Reunion, opened at number one in the box office, eventually bringing in $63 million on a $6 million budget. So where's his new greelit studio? Where's the new Fox division announcing plans to put out at least a couple African American-aimed films a year for $10 million a pop? Funny how some niches seem worth filling, and others less so.
— Melissa Lafsky
