Martin Scorsese is a Christian, and his 2016 film Silence is about Christianity: Jesuit priests wrestling with persecution and keeping their faith before the deafening silence of God.
But what makes all this particularly weird is that a Christian film is not the same as a film that simply happens to be about Christianity. Jesus Revolution is a Christian period piece, set in 1960s California, that dramatises the birth of the “Jesus People” hippie subculture. There is also Christian TV: The Chosen is the world’s most successful crowdfunded scripted drama, producing three seasons about the life of Jesus of Nazareth with more than $28 million in donations. There are Christian romcoms, Christian thrillers, Christian action movies, and Christian dramas. In this hidden world, there are stranger versions of all the films you know and love. But despite often doing very well at the box office, they’re totally invisible to mainstream culture. There’s an entire shadow ecosystem of Christian cinema out there: films that cost tens of millions to make, and which are often put out by major distributors. This film also has a nigh-unreachable audience score of 99 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, making it more popular than Casablanca or Citizen Kane.
It is the highest-grossing film released by the studio Lionsgate since 2019 – beating even Ryan Reynolds’s big-budget action comedy The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard. And it easily beat out both Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale and the most recent Magic Mike sequel: not bad for a decidedly mid-budget production made for $15m, now sitting pretty on a $40m box office haul. In its opening weekend, it grossed more than 10 times as much as Tár, the classical music drama and unending discourse generator. You have probably never heard of this year’s most unexpected hit film.
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