Kerby Anderson

The box office success of the film I Can Only Imagine is one more illustration of the success of faith-based films. Obviously, some have done better than others. Not all of them have a Christian theme like this one, but they all do well. Movieguide released its “2018 Report to the Entertainment Industry” that looked at the box office performance of films released in 2017. Films with very strong Christian content or content that has a strong redemptive or moral theme did the best. The box office average was $57.84 million in receipts. By contrast, they found that films with very strong non-Christian content only had box office receipts of about $10.49 million. And those films with very strong secular humanist or atheist content did the worst. They only had $1.16 million in box office receipts. Ted Baehr is the founder of Movieguide and released the results at their Annual Movieguide Faith and Family Awards Gala. He noted that “Despite a couple of disturbing trends, 2017 was another big year for family movies and movies with faith and values.” These family-friendly films are not only better for the culture, they also do better financially. Of the top 10 movies worldwide in 2017, a full 90 percent of them contained “strong Christian, redemptive, biblical, or moral content.” If these family-friendly films do much better financially, why don’t more directors and producers make more family films and fewer films with gratuitous sex and violence? Unfortunately, they want accolades from their peers about doing edgy films and art house films. That is all the more reason for Christians to go to films like I Can Only Imagine in order to send a signal to Hollywood that we want more faith-based films.