Why aren't Christian films successful anymore?

[GeffreyDrogon]

A thing I think about pertaining to movies are Christian films. Nowadays, there are countless low-budget Christian films being released, but why haven't there been any huge blockbuster hits from that genre since Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ? It's so strange, as why aren't any big Christian films released by mainstream companies successful anymore? The last attempt at that was the Ben-Hur remake in 2016, and no one has heard anything of a Passion of the Christ sequel since Gibson said that it was going to be the "biggest movie ever made".

Is it because Christian films aren't four-quadrant films, or is it for other reasons?

[EricJ]

Uh, they never really WERE "hits":
Mel Gibson used his own money to make a movie about his, er, issues, and the religious Right, so pleased to name-drop a big celebrity that was now their "friend", block-bought tickets and school-bused audiences to ballot-stuff that weekend's box office.
Followed by regular water-cooler audiences that heard about the scandal, fell for buzz that it was going to be "Oscar material", and were peer-pressured into going to see it, while the usual suspects planted wishful hype that "Hollywood [meaning, one big name they'd heard of] has seen the light!"...Mostly by the producers of Left Behind doom-thrillers trying to get their movies into actual theaters.
New Line fell for the hype, put a big budget behind "The Nativity Story", and it crashed hard. So much for the "trend".

Ever since then, Christian films have scaled back and tried to follow the leads of Atheist-fear "God's (Not) Dead" and inspirational sports "The Blind Side".
Except for said Ben-Hur remake, which was mostly over the fact that the original had fallen out of MGM/UA copyright, and was free for the taking.

[Ben]

Except for said Ben-Hur remake, which was mostly over the fact that the original had fallen out of MGM/UA copyright, and was free for the taking.

…Eh?

[GeffreyDrogon]

Mel Gibson used his own money to make a movie about his, er, issues, and the religious Right, so pleased to name-drop a big celebrity that was now their "friend", block-bought tickets and school-bused audiences to ballot-stuff that weekend's box office.
Followed by regular water-cooler audiences that heard about the scandal, fell for buzz that it was going to be "Oscar material", and were peer-pressured into going to see it, while the usual suspects planted wishful hype that "Hollywood [meaning, one big name they'd heard of] has seen the light!"...Mostly by the producers of Left Behind doom-thrillers trying to get their movies into actual theaters.

So that's why The Passion of the Christ made a huge amount of coin. Mel Gibson will be lucky if the sequel will make a fraction of what the first film made...if it ever gets made at all.

[Ben]

It will get made, after Lethal Weapon 5 goes bananas at the box office and restores Gibson's status. And it will likely be just a big a hit, for whatever reasons.

[GeffreyDrogon]

How likely will that be?

[EricJ]

…Eh?

Uh, remember how we got that one around the same time as that Magnificent Seven remake that had nothing to do with the original?

(Although it was a faith company doing the Ben-Hur remake because the original was free, not the usual case of MGM's new owners trying to film their way out of bankruptcy and back into business with remakes of their old OOC properties.)

So that's why The Passion of the Christ made a huge amount of coin. Mel Gibson will be lucky if the sequel will make a fraction of what the first film made...if it ever gets made at all.

And that's a big If:
Movie-obsessed religious-Rights, or "Passionistas" as they were called, kept trying to exploit their fifteen box-office minutes of fame, petitioning to have "Passion re-released in theaters every year at Easter!"

So they tried it, the next year. And it bombed. BADLY.
Barely played a quarter of the first release's screens, because theaters don't bother with re-releases anymore, most of whatever casual audience that liked it already had it on disc, and by that point, a year later, the blood-'n-guts had already made the movie a campy punchline, and the mystique of "Will it win an Oscar?" had already turned out to be a big fat Not Even Nominated.
(Except for three, and lost them all.)

...Look in the dictionary under "So Last Year".

[Ben]

My "eh?" was mostly based on the fact that Warner Bros. owns the 1959 MGM Ben-Hur. It is certainly not out of copyright.

And Passion's reissue was largely hampered by the fact that the DVD was a massive seller, and continued to be so for a long while, so there was basically no-one left to go back to the cinemas that hadn’t seen it or had it at home. If it had been a Director's Cut or offered something new or extra then who knows how a limited reissue would have gone, but as such that particular phenom had passed.

You can see how desperate they are getting with plugging the Avatar reissue to start drumming up interest in the new one to see a similar thing going on. Of course, we are in different times, when there is still a relative dearth of big visual films on big screens, so it has a better chance, but it’s still not going to do Avatar numbers again, is it? I think they’ll be lucky if it does Star Wars Special Edition numbers, actually…