Hollywood: The Imagination of Man’s Heart
By Jack Kinsella
It is a provable fact that G-rated family movies make more money than ‘edgier’ movies with a PG-13, lots more money than movies with an “R” rating, and any movie with a more restrictive rating than that is unlikely to break even on its production costs.
I’m not merely expressing my opinion based on my own personal tastes in film. The numbers bear out my contentions.
Among the top-20 grossing films of all time are “Shrek”, “E.T.” “Star Wars” “Jurrasic Park” “Finding Nemo” and “The Lion King.”
It is also a proven fact that “G” rated movies with Christian themes are the most consistent money-makers of all.
The C.S. Lewis Christian classic, “The Chronicles of Narnia,” was widely panned by critics on release as “too Christian” — until it earned $291 million dollars.
There are a number of reasons, but the most obvious reason is that “G” rated movies have the widest potential audience.
Hollywood’s business is to attract as many possible movie-goers as possible.
The logic of business would therefore dictate that the majority of Hollywood movies would be Christian-themed and made in such a way as to earn them the lucrative “G” rating.
But when Hollywood DOES offer a Christian-themed, “G”-rated movie, it is generally greeted with fear and trepidation, earning such adjectives as “daring” or “risky” –when in point of fact, they are the safest bet of all.
If there has been a Christian-themed, “G” rated film produced by a major studio that lost money, I am not aware of it.
Even the bad ones turn a profit.
Forget the religious aspect for a moment and stay with me on the secular perspective. In America, some eight of ten moviegoers are at least culturally Christian — and most of them have families.
On the other hand, less than one in ten are agnostics, and less than two percent — or one in fifty — are atheists.
If you were planning to invest millions in a film project with your bottom line goal being to attract the widest audience, which pond would you fish in?
Assessment
Given the profitability of “G” rated movies and the depth of the Christian audience in America, why in the world would Hollywood produce something like “The Golden Compass?”
The film is based on the first book of a fantasy trilogy called “His Dark Materials” by the celebrated evangelist of atheism, Phillip Pullman. Pullman’s trilogy is unique in that its theme is that believing in God is the source of all evil in the world.
The film’s heroine is an orphaned girl living in a parallel universe ruled under the dogmatic dictatorship of the “Magisterium” a fictionalized version of the Catholic Church, that is the embodiment of ultimate evil.
In the film, the spiritual good guys are the ‘daemons’ (demons) who inhabit the bodies of animals.
Despite heavily-hyped pre-release publicity, the film’s release earned both disappointing reviews and an even more disappointing box office. The film, which cost $180 million, returned only $25 million in its North American opening weekend.
(It did better in Europe where there are more atheists and fewer Christians, but has yet to come close to breaking even.)
So why make films like “The Golden Compass” in the first place? It isn’t like there aren’t ten million movie plots in the Bible, and a Bible-themed film is always a safe bet.
In “The Golden Compass” the overt glorification of atheism is toned down in favor of the glorification of childhood rebellion.
In particular, the heroine of the movie is rebellious against her mother, and adults in general, who are involved in the evil Magisterium. It also encourages children to get involved in the occult.
The movie website, in the “Meet Your Daemon” feature, itself encourages children to contact their own personal Daemon:
“To discover your very own Daemon, look into your heart, and answer the following 20 questions openly and honestly. Your true character and the form of your Daemon will be revealed.”
Again, one has to shake one’s head. This is another one of those places where the spiritual and the physical come into collision — you can tell because everything is upside down.
It makes no sense, in the natural, to invest millions in a film whose theme will antagonize more than half its potential audience before it even gets released.
Yet for every film targeted at Hollywood’s majority audience, there are a dozen aimed at society’s perverts, Satanists or have an anti-God message.
Movies are popular because they provide a form of escapism from the reality of life, allowing our imagination to run wild on film.
And judging from the movies we watch, our collective imagination tends to run towards the dark side of evil.
When speaking the timing of the Rapture, Jesus said, “But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but My Father only.”
Having made it clear that no man could know the day or the hour, however, Jesus then gave us an important clue whereby we could know when it was ‘near, even at the doors’.
“But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.” (Matthew 24:37-38)
Genesis 6:5 describes the “days of Noe” — from the perspective of the Lord (and as confirmed by Hollywood in virtually every film release):
“And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” (Genesis 6:7)
“Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh.” (Matthew 24:44)
Note: Originally Published in December 2007 but still relevant today with movies getting darker and darker physically and spiritually.