How American cinema embraced evangelical dollar

For years the American Christian movement has been trying to combat the Satan that is Hollywood.

In recent times, the first indication that there might be a market for Christian-themed films came not with Mel Gibson's The Passion of The Christ but with a fundamentalist thriller about the Apocalypse, entitled The Omega Code, released in 1999. It was the first venture into feature film by the televangelist Trinity Broadcasting Network. Like Gibson's film, it was marketed through word of mouth at churches, whose congregations were bused to multiplexes.

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Other overtly Christian outfits have tried to pull off the same trick since, but the results have been mixed. More successful have been the attempts to influence the home entertainment market, notably the efforts of a pair of Utah-based Mormon companies who offer expurgated versions of Hollywood staples, minus the sex and bad language.

Since Gibson's monster hit we have seen Walden Media - an explicitly Christian-inspired production company bankrolled by Philip Anschutz, of Millennium Dome fame - roll out the first instalment of their Narnia series. We have seen Christian-themed films popping up on cinema screens with greater regularity, like the faith and American football movie Facing The Giants. And we have also seen Rupert Murdoch's Fox spawn a mini-division entitled Fox Faith, which puts out titles like Love's Abiding Joy and The Ultimate Gift.

One project now in the works is a film version of the Milton epic Paradise Lost, from Legendary Pictures, the company that produced Batman Begins.