The Journal. - The Return of Religious Films to Hollywood

Episode Date: September 23, 2024

Christian filmmakers have surprised Hollywood with a series of box office hits and now investors are pouring in millions. WSJ’s John Jurgensen explains how their successes could change the entertainment industry. Further Reading:  - Religious Movies Are Sweeping Hollywood. Rich Investors Are Pouring In Millions.  - Fans Pour Funding - and Faith - Into a Hit Drama About Jesus  - A Child-Trafficking Thriller Is Taking on Hollywood. Who’s behind it?  Further Listening:  - With Great Power, Part 1: Origin Story  - Mattel Bets Big on Barbie  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the early days of Hollywood, stories about the Bible dominated the silver screen. You could look back to the time of the big studios, you know, the heyday golden age of the big studios when, you know, religious epics of the Ten Commandments and Spartacus and things like that were the ultimate mainstream. Rome is an affront to God. Rome is strangling my people and my country and the whole Earth. What do you think will save you? The God of my fathers.

I'm Spartacus. I'm Spartacus. I'm Spartacus. You know, it's the biggest story and literally the greatest story ever told. And so that was a thriving genre in Hollywood. That's our colleague John Jurgensen, who covers entertainment. He says that over time, these kinds of biblical stories fell out of popularity. And in the decades that followed, many of the religious films that did get made

were produced on the cheap. This faith content has always been doing it on a small budget. Grandmothers and churches are contributing funds to these movies getting made. They're used to making things on a shoestring. And religious-based movies were often kind of preachy. I'm Jesus. I know everything. Everything you see inside there, it's all about Christmas. It's all about Jesus.

But more recently, these Christian-oriented movies have gotten a makeover, and a new wave of filmmakers are on the rise. What we've seen in the last few years is an influx of movies that have really surprised Hollywood with their successes, either at the box office or in other non-traditional ways. And these are movies that kind of seem to come out of nowhere. In a lot of cases, they are faith-based films and TV shows about the life of Jesus or about religious subjects. One big hit in the past few years is the TV series The Chosen.

Jesus is finally here! Will you come with me? And there was also the movie Jesus Revolution. If you feel like you're misunderstood and judged, this is where you belong. And Sound of Freedom. Because God's children are not for sale. These shows and movies have found big audiences

and commercial success. And now Hollywood is trying to get back into the game. Studios are really struggling right now to figure out what people will show up for. And I think people in the faith world believe they have something to offer. They believe they have something that can capture a broad swath of audience members

who may have more in common than they know. Because basically you're trying to ask like, is this the next big thing in Hollywood? Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Monday, September 23rd. Coming up on the show, Jesus is making a comeback in Hollywood.

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with your membership rewards points? Earn points on everyday purchases. Use them for that long-awaited vacation. Points never expire, so use them how you want. That's the powerful backing of American Express. On eligible cards, terms apply. Learn more at mx.ca. The first sign that there might be a modern-day opportunity for religious movies came in 2004

with the release of Mel Gibson's epic The Passion of the Christ. It was a serious film about Jesus, and the dialogue was entirely in the ancient languages of Aramaic, Hebrew, and Latin. That really sort of was a record scratch for Hollywood was the passion of the Christ, which was just, you know, it took the world by storm, not just because it was such a big success, but because it was such a visceral treatment of the story of Jesus Christ, and it was a huge hit. And signal to Hollywood, of course, wherever there's money, Hollywood follows and signaled to Hollywood that there was a

market there. But when Hollywood tried to go after this market, after the passion of the Christ, it didn't go so well. A lot of movies were flops, like Evan Almighty, a comedic take on the story of Noah's Ark, starring Steve Carell as an unwilling Noah, and Morgan Freeman as God. You know, people in the faith-based content world still talk about that movie as sort of a prime example

of, you know, what Hollywood does when they get it wrong. So, you're... really him, aren't you? You want more proof? I haven't done the Pillow of Salt thing in a while. Hollywood Studios had tried and failed to make some of these big movies in the wake of the Passion of the Christ. It didn't work out for them, and of course, they're going to abandon that. That's a bad business model for them. With Hollywood giving up on the genre again,

there was a gap in the market, which eventually gave rise to a new generation of independent filmmakers. So, one of the most important players in this world is Angel Studios. It's a studio, independent studio based in Provo, Utah, essentially Mormon country. And they got their start by trying to scrub content from Hollywood studios and clean it up. Essentially, their business model when they first got started, before they were called Angel Studios, was to filter movies from all kinds of big studios

so families could watch them at home together, so you could scrub out the sex and the violence and the curse words and things like that. But their business of scrubbing Hollywood movies for sex and curse words ultimately got sued by Hollywood studios that claimed copyright infringement. So the founders pivoted. One thing what Angel decided to do was like, hey, instead of trying to clean up what Hollywood

is giving us, why don't we just create our own stuff? Angel Studios co-founder Jordan Harmon said that he loved the storytelling on shows like House of Cards and Game of Thrones, but he thought it had a bad impact on society. Here he is talking about it on a podcast. We thought, is there a way that you can get all that incredible conflict and compelling storytelling into stories that are going to uplift society in the end.

Starting in 2017, Angel Studios collaborated with a Christian filmmaker named Dallas Jenkins to help launch a scripted drama about the life of Jesus and his followers. It was called The Chosen. You only need me. In the first season of the show, Jesus starts building his group of disciples and performing miracles. Do you want to be healed? The show was free to watch on the Chosen app, and it became a massive success.

The Chosen is also a movement. I highly recommend you go see The Chosen because it is so good. This is an amazing show to watch, to learn the scripture. For some reason, I'm just sitting here like hoping that it ends differently or like hoping there's a happy ending. This was a TV show that became a phenomenon unto itself and has become kind of one of the biggest entertainment products of the last five years or so. Why was The Chosen such a hit? Like, what was different about it compared to other types of

sort of faith-based TV shows? Yeah, it's a great question. The Chosen succeeded in a different way because it was made in a different way. And this goes back to this idea that you can learn lessons from secular content, mainstream content. Its creator, Dallas Jenkins, really tried to apply some of the storytelling methods that he loved.

Let's take the lessons of A Breaking Bad or The Wire and apply it to these stories that we feel are so powerful. What The Chosen does is allows you to kind of live with these characters. You know, it's a character-driven story that by its very nature, the scriptures and the gospels of the Bible are sort of like Cliff Notes versions of what these stories are. So it's essentially kind of an unpacking and a deeper dive into this world. But what might be even more surprising than its content is how The Chosen was funded.

Many of its fans paid directly to support it. Their pitch was, if you pay us money, you know, pay into this pot, you're keeping it free and allowing other people to watch it. You know, it's very much of an evangelical, spread the gospel kind of message. They are literally funding the product itself. And so that is a level of engagement and motivation and complete commitment by an audience. The Chosen collected about $11 million to help fund production of the first season.

By season four, crowdfunding helped the show's budget hit $40 million. Following a business dispute with Jenkins, the show's creator, Angel Studios is no longer involved in The Chosen. In hopes of finding the next big hit, Angel Studios also relies on its fans to help make decisions about future programming. They call it the Angel Guild. Essentially, what they have done is created a kind of focus group, you know, of thousands and thousands of users and members to sort of take a look at movies and TV shows that

creators propose to Angel, and they essentially vote on them and say, hey, this is worth putting out. And so if enough of this Angel Guild, as it's called, says yes to these films and these TV shows, Angel releases them out into the world. The Angel model is pretty fascinating just from a business standpoint. The crowd decides what this company is putting in out. It's a sort of crowd-sourced way of dealing with content. Angel Studios has also put out shows that are not directly tied to religion, including a clean stand-up series called Dry Bar Comedy. I love playing hide and go seek with my kids.

I figured out it's the safest way for me to abandon them. Just for a moment. And then, last year, Angel Studios released a movie called Sound of Freedom, which had nothing to do with religion on the surface. It's a modern-day thriller about child trafficking. You and I have been talking about faith-based entertainment and faith films and things like that, but the reality is they're trying to be more than that. And in fact, Angel Studios doesn't like to be called a faith-driven studio.

And they're also trying to make stuff that doesn't necessarily fit into that category. They're trying to reach a bigger audience. They're trying to broaden themselves beyond the idea of a Bible film or a film about Jesus. With Sound of Freedom, their big hit movie, that really kind of helped explode that notion of what that studio is. The Sound of Freedom became one of the biggest box office hits of the year and grossed $250 million worldwide.

It was kind of a galvanizing film for the politically conservative culture, for whom this topic of child trafficking was a real hot button thing and was a real important topic. All this success has gotten the attention once again from big Hollywood studios. That's next. With all the success of shows like The Chosen and movies like Sound of Freedom, some big name studios have started to put down money.

Netflix is investing in inspiring content. Amazon MGM Studios, which of course is part of Amazon Prime, their streaming services, they've done a deal with one of the big directors in this space. They say that they are also looking overall to bulk up in this world of faith-driven and faith-adjacent content. They see it as part of their library that needs to be filled out. Recently, our colleague John went to Greece to visit the set of Amazon's newest faith-based project. It's a TV series based on the biblical story of David and Goliath. It's called House of David. We were in Greece in late July under pretty punishing sun. So it's an extreme situation to begin with.

That there is a God in Israel and all this assembly shall know that the Lord and the Spirit delivereth neither by sword nor by spear. You have all these actors and extras dressed up as soldiers. There are Israelites and Philistines on horses and carrying swords and shields and things like that. And seeing all these folks on horseback and all these film crews getting ready for these big charges, trying to make something happen,

it just felt like kind of being on another planet. Action, action. The studio that's producing this television show for Amazon is called The Wonder Project, and they have big goals. They want to build an empire of faith and values-based content in Hollywood. What they aspire to be is kind of like the HBO or the A24 of wholesome content.

They want to become a brand, right, that you go to and you can kind of trust for a certain level of quality and storytelling, right, that's gonna be clean. The person on set who's behind all this is John Irwin, the co-creator of House of David. Irwin started his career making Christian music videos and later moved into directing religious feature films. While in Greece, John sat down with Erwin in the show's production office to discuss

why he thinks House of David will be a hit. And you do have shades of what you would love about a fantasy epic or a period epic, something like, you know, Camelot and Merlin or dragons in Game of Thrones. In this story, you have giants and you have the spirit of God, which is very much, you know, takes the place of the forest in Star Wars, you know, or magic in Harry Potter.

Irwin says audiences in America have a hunger for this kind of content. There's just very few things that you can enjoy multi-generationally as a family. But I love the experience of enjoying something together. And that's a rare experience. Irwin said that Hollywood is realizing the potential, and he's seeing that firsthand, as he has multiple projects currently funded by Amazon. There's a lot of large corporations and studios that see legitimately that there is an audience that continues to prove that they're much larger than they think, and they simply don't

know how to reach them. And I've found that there's a lot of gaps. There's a religious gap. There's a cultural gap. They just don't know how to help. They need a bridge to the audience. That's what we hope to be, and improve, that you can make great content

specifically for an audience that I'm a part of. A group of financiers, from Hollywood players to Christian investors, have put more than $100 million into Irwin's production house, The Wonder Project. That funding will help it develop a slate of movies and TV shows. And just last week, another studio made a similar announcement. Dallas Jenkins, the creator of The Chosen, said he planned to create an entire Marvel Universe-style series of TV shows and movies featuring other biblical figures like Moses and Joseph.

of TV shows and movies featuring other biblical figures like Moses and Joseph. What does the recent success of this type of content say about the potential of this market? I think, you know, what people in the faith world would say is that it indicates that there is an underserved audience who wants something that's, dark, that's not dystopian necessarily, that they want something that has sort of, not just even wholesome messages, but sort of inspiring messages. People in this world talk about the traditional

eight o'clock hour of television that doesn't really exist anymore. They almost kind of, they sort of wax poetic about that time when people would, families would sit down at the TV and watch things together because they knew it was, you know, going to be safe. And whether or not that was true, because not every family, of course, grew up that way, they sort of idealized that

kind of bringing together moment of entertainment as something that they want to replicate as literally a business model. And going back to what streaming services need to do, streaming services need to serve not just the folks who want, you know, horror films and racy, real reality TV, but also audiences that want to sit down with the kids and watch something on Friday or Saturday night that they know they can trust, right? So they need to capture this holistic view of the audience. And so I think that's why streaming services especially are keen on

kind of bulking up in this area of content which sort of appeals to a broad swath of people who want clean stuff essentially. people who want clean stuff, essentially. How difficult do you think it'll be for John Irwin to pull off his vision of turning The Wonder Project into like this HBO or A24 of clean content? You know, any number of people are trying to be the A24 of what have you, right? Like, I don't expect religious TV shows and movies to sweep culture in the way that superheroes did or that Marvel or Disney has the power to do.

But these filmmakers have proven that there are ways to, even if these are singles and doubles, to capture audiences and passionate audiences that sort of over-index, right, that sort of have a very high intensity attachment to what they're making, right. And so that is probably, you know, a valuable thing unto itself. The idea of becoming a brand that people associate with a certain level of quality and content is difficult, especially because it's just

so hard to get audiences to pay attention to anything. It's the same problem. It's the same conundrum facing every content creator out there. That's all for today, Monday, September 23rd. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We're out every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.