Box office: Four religious and/or politically conservative films land in the top ten

The political doc Am I Racist? and the latest God's Not Dead sequel join holdovers Reagan and The Forge in this week's list.

It’s a spectrum: The four films this week that have some sort of conservative appeal, arranged from the most political (on the left) to the most religious (on the right).

There’s not a whole lot happening at the very top of this week’s box-office chart.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is still the #1 film in North America—with a very good $51.6 million for the weekend and a ten-day total of $188 million—and the only new major-studio release is Speak No Evil, a modestly-budgeted remake of a European thriller, which landed in the #2 spot with a similarly modest $11.5 million.

But look a little further down, and there’s almost something of a traffic jam of movies that are aimed at political and religious conservatives:

• Am I Racist?, a documentary produced by The Daily Wire that takes aim at D.E.I. initiatives, landed in 4th place with $4.75 million.

• Reagan, a biopic of the former Republican president, landed in 5th place with $2.96 million, raising its cume to $23.3 million after three weeks.

• The Forge, a “faith-based” movie about male mentorship, was nearly tied for 8th place with $2 million, raising its cume to $24.1 million after four weeks.

• God’s Not Dead: In God We Trust, the fifth film in the decade-old God’s Not Dead series, landed in 10th place with $1.8 million since opening on Thursday.

It bears emphasizing that politics and religion are not the same thing, and that not all people who are conservative in one area are conservative in the other. And yet, there is definitely some overlap between these genres and their target audiences.

This overlap is most obvious, perhaps, in the God’s Not Dead series, which has always blended religion and politics—to the point where, in the newest film, David Hill (the pastor played by producer David A.R. White) actually runs for Congress.

Similarly, Reagan tells the life story of a famous politician, but some of the people who made the film have been very active in the “faith-based” genre, and it sounds like the film (which I have not yet seen) pays significant attention to the role of religion in Reagan’s life. (“Faith-based” veteran Kevin Sorbo plays Reagan’s pastor.)

Meanwhile, a friend who has seen Am I Racist? assures me that that film is explicitly political, not religious—but even there, the lines are blurred, insofar as the film is distributed by Soli Deo Gloria Releasing (the name is Latin for ‘Glory to God Alone’), a company founded by the writers of the original God’s Not Dead, which also distributes explicitly religious films like the “Christian horror movie” Nefarious.

That just leaves The Forge, which is the one film on this list that I have seen, and—like the other films produced and directed by the Kendrick brothers—it has no political axe to grind. Instead, it’s focused on purely pastoral concerns (prayer, etc.).

I’m not entirely sure why there’s such a pile-up of these films right now. I assume it’s partly because smaller films like these tend to avoid the summer and other seasons when they’d be swamped by blockbusters and the like. And maybe the more political films are coming out right now because of the American election season.

(The Forge, the one explicitly non-political film of the bunch, came out in late August, and the last two films produced by the Kendrick brothers—2015’s War Room and 2019’s Overcomer—also had late-August release dates. So the Kendricks, at least, were probably just sticking with a release schedule that had worked for them before.)

Whatever the reason, it’s a striking confluence of films, all of which could arguably be perceived as rivals for the same audience. I don’t think there are all that many other films like this coming up soon, so in theory, the distributors of these films could have spaced things out a little more and given each other some room.

But maybe I’m overlooking something.¹

And now, a few more stats and facts re: this week’s top ten, title by title: