Movies, Morality And Money

Curious article in The Hollywood Reporter on the "Movieguide Faith and Value Awards." A bunch of Hollywood people met last week to honor films that "promote Judeo-Christian ethics." The big winners were The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Toy Story 3, Secretariat and Mao's Last Dancer.

Since they do nothing but give awards out here, there's no reason this group shouldn't get in on it.  But they also claim it's good box office:

Movies with pro-atheism messages in 2010, for example, earned an average $6.6 million while movies portraying "very strong Biblical morality" earned $78 million. Movies with lots of profanity earned $23 million and movies without profanity earned $50 million. Movies with messages advocating a "Christian" worldview earned $105 million and those advocating "miscellaneous morality" earned $10 million, according to the study.

First question--what movies with pro-atheism messages?  I don't recall a single one last year, so I'd love to see their list.

Anyway, this sort of analysis is weak.  In general, yes, people have always preferred movies with heroes who do the right thing.  But is that what they mean by "Biblical morality"?  The top five films last year were Toy Story 3, Alice In Wonderland, Iron Man 2, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse and Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Part 1.  So I guess Biblical morality means witchcraft, vampires, werewolfs, crazy people, toys coming alive and iconoclastic billionaires.

As for profanity, once again, it's true that some are turned off by swearing, but there's also some self-selection here.  If you swear more than a few times (as the makers of The King's Speech have discovered), you get an R-rating.  This artificially limits your audience, and makes producers who are behind big-budgets films that require huge grosses usually see to it their films don't have a lot of profanity.  Meanwhile, lower-budget films, and artier films with adult themes, which are far less likely to make more money to begin with, can swear as much as they like.

As for "Christian" versus "miscellaneous" morality, I wish they'd give some examples.  I honestly don't know what they're referring to.  Explicitly "Christian" films rarely do that well at the box office.  In fact, once you get past The Passion Of The Christ and The Chronicles Of Narnia series (which I'll call Christian--and note the latest has performed disappointingly), there aren't any Christian films in the past few decades that could be called major hits.

If you look at the charts, the clearest message is probably to make cartoons.  The other is make visually strong films if you want them to do well overseas.  I liked the Movieguide award-winning Secretariat, but it only made half as much as a film that cost half as much to make--Jackass 3-D.  So it takes all kinds. By all means, if you want to make money, employ conventional morality, but people who think they've found a formula can easily lose their shirts.  The only real formula is good storytelling, hopefully on a project you're passionate about.