Screenwriter

Donald Clarkeon Hollywood's Christian crusade

At the end of the last decade, when transition was in the air, soothsayers observed the success of The Blair Witch Project, a film made by ordinary blokes for the price of a Mars Bar, and declared that citizen film- makers were about to colonise the summer. Of course, this didn't quite happen.

A few years later, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ raked in even more loot and, once again, seismic shifts in cinema's tectonic plates were confidently forecast. To this date, the coke-sniffing, flag-burning adulterers who run the US film industry had paid little attention to the Christian demographic, but the success of Gibson's film demonstrated that fortunes could be made diverting funds from the nation's collection plates.

Well, it looks as if the faithful will not be so easily exploited.

The first significant attempt to relive Christians of their shekels was, it is true, a success. In 2005, Disney hired Motive Marketing, the firm that had masterminded the campaign for The Passion, to sell The Chronicles of Narnia to religious audiences. The adaptation of CS Lewis's novel - long viewed as a Christian allegory - went on to hoover up $745 million, though most Narnia fans were probably more excited by the big swords and horned helmets than they were by the allusions to the Holy Trinity.

Hollywood came a cropper when it made a more explicit effort to drive believers into the multiplexes. Last Christmas New Line released The Nativity Story. As dull as it was respectable, the film was crucified at the wickets and failed to rise again on DVD.

Now word reaches us that Evan Almighty, the astronomically costly sequel to Bruce Almighty, has bombed spectacularly in the US. Tom Shadyac's film, in which Steve Carrell is instructed by God to take on duties previously performed by Noah, cost $250 million to make but drew in only $31 million on its opening weekend. After two weeks it has been written off as a financial catastrophe of (hem, hem) biblical proportions. All this despite Universal Pictures putting its weight behind Ark Almighty,

a campaign aimed at alerting Christians to its religious themes.

One can sympathise with those Christians who resent their churches being commandeered by Hollywood marketers. James A Smith, writing in the Florida Baptist Witness, puts it rather well. "It's past time, I believe, for Churches and Christian media to reassess whether Hollywood's increasingly aggressive marketing of the Christian market had crossed a line in which the church is being cleverly co-opted."

In telling the studios where to go, Mr Smith and his co-believers have demonstrated that movie punters may not be quite so malleable as marketing wonks believe. They have also helped confirm that all those glib pronouncements concerning The Passion of the Christ's effect on the economics of cinema were, like similar claims made following the release of The Blair Witch Project, just so much hot air.

Incidentally, Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick, directors of Blair Witch, have been sweating in development hell since 1999.