Watching jesus revolution exceed $45 million in ticket sales for Lions Gate—matching or besting The Fabelmans, The Banshees of Inisherin, Tar, women who talk And triangle of sadness, combined – it finally seems safe to say. THE faith based the public is back.

Between Covid and the culture wars, it’s been a tough few years for those who make, promote and/or enjoy what are loosely called inspirational films. Sometimes the images are overtly religious, as with jesus revolutionthe true story of a pastor and his countercultural followers in the 1970s. Others are simply ambitious stories – moralistic, value-laden, like Creed III Or Respectabout individuals striving to be more and better than they already are.

Either way, the uplift business was struggling until Top Gun: Maverick broke through, on a strictly secular level, last year. The Latest Explicitly Religious Film To Surpass $40 Million box office seems to have been Breakthroughfrom Fox, in 2019. In 2021, especially, darker fantasies—Spider-Man: No Coming Home, Venom: let there be carnage, Black Widow— prevailed. (Although the quite inspiring but private box office CODA slipped into the Oscars.)

Either way, it’s nice to have the faith crowd back in the seats.

Prior to the Great Lockdown and concurrent sociopolitical eruptions on issues such as abortion and gender identity, left-leaning Hollywood seemed to be finding common ground with more right-wing religious conservatives who are a mainstay in the media market. inspiration.

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 film companies and these tens of millions of mostly Christian and faith-based viewers. Working in a loose partnership with fellow journalist Brooks Barnes – although the obsession was my own – I invested a fair amount of energy and Time capital to get to know dozens of people who quietly tried to reconcile cinema and questions of the mind.

It was a fascinating visit. I remember having lunch with the rather secular producer Joe Roth, who explained to me that by making a film like miracles from heavenhe did not have to believe what his collaborators believed, but he had to believe that they believed. A few days later, I spoke with Roth’s fellow producer, Bishop TD Jakes, who was stunned to learn that Roth had already been a plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that banned school prayer. . They had too much in common to worry about their differences.

The most interesting agents were those hired by the studios to find and promote faith-aligned values ​​in seemingly religious mainstream films like Frozen, defile, hidden numbers Or Twelve years of slavery. Even a movie as unlikely as Bedroom, about the confinement of a kidnapped woman, had its faith campaign. Until culture boiled over with the 2016 election, movies were important to religious audiences, and that audience was important to movies.

THE Time project, intended as a three-part series, more or less imploded when I left the newspaper in the summer of 2016. Brooks picked up the theme and wrote a beautiful piece, which was published on December 25 of that year (with, if I remember correctly, an illustration that featured a strangely incongruous Christmas Day crucifix).

As for the producers and consultants who had built bridges – Roth, DeVon Franklin, Corby Pons, Marshall Mitchell, Jonathan Bock, Matthew Faraci, Ted Baehr and others – they did not evaporate. You can still find most of them doing the same job with a simple Google search.

But they seemed to withdraw a bit, to shut up as the movies grew darker, angrier, and less inspirational.

Maybe until now. If the faithful are back on the theater benches, amen. An uprising is called for.