Ben-Hur remake flops at box office, fails to attract religious audience

'Faith is not a niche,' said one expert

Jack Huston in Ben-Hur

After a summer characterised by box-office blunders, it was barely thinkable that yet another $100 million-plus budget film could flop. Enter Ben-Hur, Paramount’s latest remake.

In its first weekend in US cinemas, the film made just $11.35 million, falling in fifth place behind the likes of Suicide Squad (still at number one), Sausage Party, War Dogs, and Kubo And The Two Strings (the latter two also being new this weekend).

The film was intended to reach out to a religious audience, Paramount said to have screened the film to numerous pastors before release. Cinescore demographic results also showed that faith-based cinema-goers were more likely to give the film a better

“Faith is not a niche,” Matthew Faraci, president of Inspire Buzz - an agency that reaches the faith crowd - told Deadline. “There are 52 million Americans in the values audience - one in every three moviegoers - more than enough audience alone to propel a film like Ben-Hur to box office success.

“Therefore, in a situation where the content is well-crafted and faithful but there is lower-than-expected box office performance, you have to take a serious look at the marketing strategy and analyse how it fell short in driving turnout and convincing folks to show up.”

Ben-Hur also proves the long-held belief that rebooting classics is almost never a good idea; as Deadline’s report points out, both 1998’s Psycho ($21.5M), and 2006’s All The King’s Men ($7.2M) failed to make a profit at the box-office (the Coen Brother’s True Grit being the exception).

Previously, one of the film’s lead actors, Toby Kebbell, revealed that the film would not contain the homoerotic overtones of the 1959 oscar-winning classic.

He told The Independent back in June: “In 1959, the word homosexual had some terrifying connotations to the globe in general. After all, it wasn’t long since it was illegal in England. It was a different place in time. It doesn’t have the same fear factor now, but you do a performance and people will interpret it to what it reflects in their own life.”