Newsweek: Hollywood: Praise the Movie!

[question everything]

Hollywood: Praise the Movie!

Newsweek

Nov. 21, 2005 issue - A movie director, a studio executive and a preacher walk into a church. It sounds like the start of a bad joke, but it's the beginning of a new trend in Hollywood marketing. Inspired by the surprise box-office success of "The Passion of the Christ," distributors have increasingly been taking their faith-based movies to church, much to the delight of many religious leaders. "Films can speak powerfully," says assistant pastor David Manne, who fields calls from studio executives to set up movie screenings at Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa in Santa Ana, Calif. "People that wouldn't normally go to church will come in to see a movie."

And people who wouldn't normally go to a movie in a theater will see it if it's pastor-approved and shown at their church. To tap into that market, Disney has hired "Passion's" PR firm to promote the Christian-themed "The Chronicles of Narnia" with dozens of sneak-peek events at churches across the country. (Preachers are reportedly urged to give "Narnia"-themed sermons and invite non-Christians to see the movie with the congregation.) The latest film adaptation of the best-selling Biblical end-of-times "Left Behind" books skipped theaters altogether with a straight-to-church release; it played last month on screens in 3,200 churches. For perspective, rapper 50 Cent's film "Get Rich or Die Tryin' " opened last week in just 1,652 theaters.

The marketing tactic hasn't been limited to evangelicals: an anti-Wal-Mart documentary by left-wing director Robert Greenwald is currently being screened in some 1,000 churches across the country, and "Ushpizin," a Hebrew-language comedy, is being shown to Orthodox Jews in venues where men and women sit on separate sides of the auditorium. "It's another way for people to praise God," says Peter Lalonde, executive producer of "Left Behind: World at War." And it doesn't hurt if they praise the movie, too.

—Elise Soukup


URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10017899/site/newsweek/

[papau]

1. "Ushpizin," the Hebrew-language comedy - is comedy while saying

it is good to be kind - even to escaped criminals.

[Drewskie]

2. New Line

New Line Cinema is bring Phillup Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy to the big screen. I'd like to see them show that in church... I know that probably nobody on these boards but me has read the books (I'm a huge reader), but if you've read them you know how they stand in comparison to the Narnia books. ;) Hope they don't tone them down to any extant... especially the last book.