Lion behind the scenes takes a gamble on Christian audience

Philip Anschutz, son of a Kansas wildcatter, knows just about all there is to know about dry holes. This is just as well, considering the Denver entrepreneur's deepening involvement in Hollywood, where the strike rate for films is one success for three duds and from where he is currently making his boldest gamble.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a $150 million (€127.8 million) adaptation of CS Lewis's classic Christian allegory, is made by Anschutz's Walden Media in partnership with Walt Disney, and comes to the market in a blizzard of publicity. The man himself is expected to stay well behind the scenes, as has been his habit since he gave his last interview 30 years ago.

Anschutz is now 66, and despite a string of successful, high-profile ventures dating back to his early 20s, little is known about his personal life except that he is a solid conservative Republican, a devout Christian and worth about $5 billion.

But as he made plain in a rare public speech a year ago, he has in his later years engineered a merger between his business ethos and his private religious and political beliefs.

"My friends think I am a candidate for a lobotomy," he said of his adventures in film. "But you know what? I don't care. If we can make some movies that have a positive effect on people's lives and on our culture, that's enough for me."

But he also betrayed a hard-nosed approach that has many in the film industry nodding in agreement.

"It is of utmost importance for a business to try and figure out a way to make goods and products that people actually want to buy." Hollywood's hidebound studio chiefs, he said, did not understand this, "because they keep making the same old movies".

With the US box office in the dumps and profits from DVDs drying up, anyone with a new idea, and especially anyone with billions to back it, is welcome. And in Walden's estimation, the next big thing is "uplifting" productions for all the family.

The newcomer's approach has roused chatter in Hollywood about the advisability of the apparent breach of unwritten rules separating overt religious messages and celluloid.

But there has so far been nothing to compare with the blather accompanying Mel Gibson's gory The Passion of the Christ, which knocked everyone sideways last year when it drew millions of people who rarely visited the cinema and raked in almost $620 million at the box office.

More attention has been paid to the possibility that, with six more books in Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia series, Disney and Walden may end up with a rich franchise to compare with Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings.

After all, Anschutz has a long history of finding hidden value in ventures others considered hopeless.

After starting in oil, a one billion barrel discovery in the early 1980s set him up to buy into railways, at a time when some saw redundancy approaching and road transport set to dominate.

But the shrewd Anschutz had a plan. A subsequent merger of his interests into Union Pacific left him with control of underground rights of way along the tracks. He parlayed this into a network of optical-fibre links that was to grow into the Qwest telecommunications giant.

Over the past five years he has assembled a private collection of alleged white elephants that has many wondering what he will dig up next. Assets now controlled by the private Anschutz Corporation include a clutch of US soccer teams (bought cheaply when the league ran into financial trouble) and thousands of debt-laden US cinemas that still struggle for consistent profits.

Earlier this year, he moved into another "dubious" business, with the purchase for a mere $20 million of the failing San Francisco Examiner. He converted it into a giveaway tabloid, followed by the launch of a sister paper in Washington DC, and signalled his ambitions by registering the Examiner name in 63 US cities.

London's Millennium Dome, seen in the UK as a national embarrassment, has also found a place in his portfolio, joining a stake in the Los Angeles Staples Centre, America's second-largest pop concert booking business, and holdings in international ice hockey and basketball teams.

What makes it all hang together can be traced back to the fibre networks that underpinned Qwest and satellites in near space which are being eyed by Hollywood as digital distribution platforms to beam films to dishes on theatre roofs. Digital systems, including projectors, are slowly but surely replacing the cumbersome and costly hand-delivered cans filled with reels that have been the norm for a century.

All the while, Anschutz has been tightening his embrace of Hollywood. His record so far is mixed.

With this latest and boldest gamble - that the vast Christian audience largely responsible for the success of The Passion of the Christ will join the usual crowd to see a heavily promoted movie - Anschutz's conviction that Hollywood has it wrong and that he knows what is best for consumers will be severely tested, along with the audience's appetite for the uplifting.