Hollywood courting Christians
THE Reverend Roderick Dwayne Belin, a senior AME Church leader, stood before over 1,000 pastors in a Marriott ballroom in Naperville, Illinois, this month and extolled the virtues of a Hollywood movie.
“Imagine this clip playing to your congregation, perhaps tied to a theological discussion about our sacred lives and our secular lives and how there is really no division,” he said, before showing the trailer for Hidden Figures, which 20th Century Fox will release nationwide on January 6.
The film is a drama about unsung black heroines in the NASA space race of the 1960s. But Fox – working with a little-known firm called Wit PR, which pitches movies to churches – sought out Belin to help sell it as an aspirational story about women who have faith in themselves.
Belin became a proponent after visiting the movie’s set, where Wit PR invited pastors to watch filming. “I came away really interested in using film to explore faith,” Belin said.
Hollywood, a land of loose morals, where materialism rules and sex and drugs are celebrated, has quietly been building con- nections to Christian filmgoers as North America’s moviegoing has been more or less flat. Last year, 1.32 billion tickets were sold, down from the 10-year high of 1.42 billion in 2009. The number of frequent moviegoers ages 12 to 24 has fallen for three straight years.
Hollywood is under pressure to reverse that trend. Churches may seem like an unusual path towards young audiences, but 41 percent of millennials engage in some form of prayer. To reach them, ministers have built social media networks. The Reverend Jamal Bryant, a megachurch pastor in Baltimore, has 250,000 followers on Twitter.
“Most studios, to be honest, have no idea how to market to us,” Bryant said. “They’re still doing the Sammy Davis Jr tap dance. ‘ Look at me! Aren’t you impressed?’ Well, no, not really. But if you bring us into the tent, we are often excited to spread the word.”
Movie studios and their partners have tapped churches, military groups, rightleaning bloggers and, particularly, marketing specialists who put their influence to work behind such films as Frozen, The Conjuring, Sully and Hidden Figures.
The marketers – for fees starting at $300,000 per film $3 million – are writing bullet points for sermons, providing footage for TV screens mounted in sanctuaries and proposing Sunday school lessons.
Studios try to keep a tight lid on their efforts, but the basic rules in selling a film are the same, said Jonathan Bock, the founder of Grace Hill Media, a Christian consultancy.
“What religious people want most when they go to the movies, like people who aren’t religious, is to be entertained,” Bock said.
The Reverend Marshall Mitchell, 46, a pastor in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, and a founder of Wit PR, and his partner, Corby Pons, 39, have been hired to use their clergy connections to tout The Magnificent Seven, a Sony remake of the classic Western; Sully, the Warner Bros hit about the 2009 emergency landing of a US Airways jet in the Hudson River; and Rules Don’t Apply, a period romance.
Elizabeth Gabler, the president of Fox 2000, the studio division behind “Hidden Figures”, said in a statement: “Corby and Marshall help to locate these important faith audiences and leaders who are hungry for aspirational content without feeling like they are going to church.”