Faith-based filmmaking isn’t dead. While the genre has struggled recently to turn out crossover hits (and nothing has topped the $611M take of Mel Gibson’s controversial smash hit “The Passion of the Christ,” still the top earner in the genre 14 years after its release), brothers Andrew and Jon Erwin’s latest film, “I Can Only Imagine,” surprised this weekend’s box officewith a $17 million opening take, good enough to push it to third place in a crowded field. Among contemporary Christian community titles, only “Heaven Is for Real” had a better opening, scoring $22 million when it opened in 2014.
Other faith-based movies have recently faltered at the box office, making the success of “I Can Only Imagine” as a bit of an outlier in a struggling — and often independently made — genre. The last big Christian-leaning hit to crack $100 million at the domestic box office was 2010’s “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,” the third film in the series and its lowest-grossing entry (the film made $104.3 million when it hit theaters in December of that year, less than half of what the first film made five years earlier). Other offerings have posted respectable box office takes, including “Heaven Is for Real,” “War Room,” and “The Shack,” but there hasn’t been a box office hit for quite some time.
Until now. In just one weekend, “I Can Only Imagine” has nearly cracked the top 20 of all Christian films released since 1980. It may soon have some other competition, though. In the lead-up to Easter Sunday, the box office will play home to another pair of faith-based features, marking March as the month for such films (there are just five “Christian” films on the docket so far this year, and only two of them didn’t make grab Easter-adjacent release dates).
