Box office: a rare-for-2023 week with no "faith-based" movies in the top ten

This week marks the first time in over two months that there were no religious movies in the weekly top-ten chart. Also: What's ahead for the rest of 2023?

Five of the “faith-based” films that have cracked the top ten so far this year.

I used to be a real box-office obsessive.

For two decades—starting in 1998, when Titanic was the #1 movie for a solid three months—I used to send e-mails to my friends every week with all the latest stats. Sometimes I even wrote about those stats at my blog. (For several years, I even made a point of comparing the Canadian and North American top-ten lists every week. It was interesting to see which films were bigger, per capita, in which territory.)

But then, in late 2019, Box Office Mojo went through an awful redesign that put a lot of their info behind a paywall and made the rest of that site hard to navigate.

And then, in early 2020, the pandemic basically shut things down for a while, and there were no significant box-office stats to report at all.

So, my weekly habit was broken, and I’ve never really gone back to it.

But, because I have done a lot of writing about the “faith-based” genre—and because it’s a genre that is often overlooked in mainstream box-office coverage (witness all the journalists who were surprised by The Chosen’s theatrical success last year, success that I had predicted months in advance)—I have sometimes filled the gap by writing about the box-office performance of those films when they come along.

And, this year, that has meant I’ve done a lot of writing about the box office!

I honestly hadn’t expected to write as much about that subject as I have this year. But when this week’s top-ten estimates came out, I realized two things: one, there were no “faith-based” films on the list; and two, this actually felt unusual now.

So I went back over the year’s top ten lists, and I realized something: there have been 16 weekends so far this year, and this is only the 6th without a “faith-based” film in the top ten. Here is how the year has unfolded so far: