A hundred years of movies: Where did faith-based films go?

by Rosanna Herrera

The film industry was in a messy predicament this past year. Two major union strikes that lasted over a hundred days each halted production and press tours– disrupting box office expectations for 2023. 

Despite the majority of film industry creatives spending the summer demanding fair wages and practices be included in their renewed contracts, this past summer also saw one of the biggest cultural moments of the past five years: “Barbenheimer.” 

“Barbie” is auteur Greta Gerwig’s foray into big studio filmmaking, and when its release date fell on the same day as blockbuster-veteran director Christopher Nolan’s historical biopic “Oppenheimer,” the internet created the “Barbenheimer” double feature.

Movie-goers of all ages flocked to theaters– at AMC theaters alone, 20,000 tickets were sold in advance to see the two on the same day. “Barbie” has since grossed over $1 billion worldwide, with “Oppenheimer” close behind at around $950 million. Some went as far as saying that the phenomenon “revived cinema” in the post-pandemic age. 

The achievements of the entertainment industry– despite a rather tumultuous couple months– led to my contemplation of pop culture at large. What it looks like today and what it looked like in the yesterdays of the past. What values did we, as an always entertainment-obsessed society, want to see reflected in our favorite movies now versus, say, a hundred years ago?

Both summer 2023 mega-hit films confront existentialism (“Barbie” more overtly than “Oppenheimer”) and each can be read as critiques of today’s United States– the former, a feminist take on the country’s persisting gender inequalities, and the latter, an anti-war exegesis that chillingly reflects on the irreversible damage of the mid-century nuclear race. 

But politics and art are a pairing as common as peanut butter and jelly. Writer and director of 2017’s Academy Award Best Picture winner “Moonlight” Barry Jenkins suggested in his TIME Magazine profile that “art is inherently political.” 

I am interested in knowing if this has always been the case. And if so, how the dominant political perspectives in popular art have changed, and what they tell us about American culture and its values. 

With these contemplations in mind, I decided to go back a hundred years because a lot happens in a century. With box office numbers being a point of interest, a quick search for 1923’s highest grossing films led me to my subject of fascination.

 

Legendary Hollywood director Cecille B. DeMille’s silent epic “The Ten Commandments” was the year’s biggest box office draw, drawing in about $4 million in revenue. Adjusted for inflation, today that would be equal to around a $70 million profit. 

DeMille’s series of biblical epics concluded with his 1956 remake of the same film– but this time, it was made using VistaVision technology and Technicolor. Like its 1923 predecessor, 1956’s “Ten Commandments” became the highest grossing film of the year and one of the top ten highest grossing films of the decade. 

As it happens, the ‘56 Exodus epic was the second to last time that a film based on the Christian Bible was the top box-office film of the year. Ten years later, director John Huston’s 1966 “The Bible in the Beginning…” snagged the top spot. But after that, the only film to have broken the top 10 was 2004’s “The Passion of the Christ,” which remains the highest grossing R-rated film of all time. 

The numbers don’t lie– and they tell us that despite the early millennium “Passion” outlier, the popularity of biblical films has severely declined in the last century. Where is the Bible in the movies today? 

It’s not in the year-end highest grossing film lists, that’s for sure. 

Rather, the Bible can be found in the low budget, independent film scene. 

While the biblical adaptations of the 20th century were categorized as “epics,” the contemporary landscape of “Bible movies” are better categorized as “faith-based films.” 

The most popular faith-based films have been depictions of Protestant scripture, so I will specifically be using the histories of mostly Protestant Christians’ relationship with film to understand the contemporary landscape of faith-based films. 

Following the controversies surrounding the recent “Sound of Freedom”, it seems increasingly relevant to ponder the place that faith-based films hold in our contemporary society. The 2023 faith-based film is about a child trafficking ring and it struck a chord with major conservatives– over-performing at the box office. But more on “Sound of Freedom” later.  

In their 2011 book “Celluloid Sermons: The Emergence of the Christian Film Industry, 1930-1986,” film scholars Terry Lindvall and Andrew Quicke define five different categories of faith-based film. The first, and most familiar, is “Biblical films,” such as the epics of DeMille, and they are the most popular under the umbrella of religious films. The second category is of “missionary films” which are anthropological documentary films. These were usually made by missionaries, and very heavily leaned into the exoticism of non-western countries. They were produced with the intention to teach about the necessity of evangelizing around the world. 

Lindvall and Quicke combine the third and fourth categories, “historical” and “biographical” films, because they both involve documenting the real-life activities of churches. Most popular in the 1920s and 30s, today the recovered films are useful historical records.

And lastly, “dramatic films.” These are narrative motion pictures that focus on “life situations”– the happenings of living as a Christian. Dramatic films, as according to “Celluloid Sermons,” focus on anything from “personal, social, [to] even economic issues.” 

In my opinion, it is from the “dramatic film” category that the modern phenomenon of faith-based films has been born. However, the function of these films within the last century has changed. 

The most notable mid-twentieth century faith-based “drama films” were produced by and large by one studio: World Wide Pictures (WWP). WWP began in 1952 as the Billy Graham Evangelistic Film Ministry. Narrative films leaned into dramatizations of true-stories of Christian believers, and were the most produced by the studio. It was by “centering the sinners” in stories of redemption and salvation that Graham believed the transformative power of God would get across. The famous Reverend Graham, known for his broadcast evangelism and political influence, started the production house as a way to share the “Gospel of Jesus Christ.”  

While it’s true the films were primarily watched by religious audiences, the Graham-led studio was influential in its “four-walling” marketing techniques. WWP would buy out the rights to their films’ theatrical releases from the movie exhibitors, so that the films would play in those theaters regardless of attendance. WWP would then intensely market the films to churches as early as six months before its release, framing the viewing of the films as activities for church folk to engage in together.