Box office: Jesus Revolution is a "faith-based" hit
Box office: Jesus Revolution is a "faith-based" hit
The film scored one of the biggest opening weekends of any movie in the genre, while co-director Jon Erwin set a CinemaScore record.
Jesus Revolution trounced expectations at the box office this week. Indeed, it more than doubled what the experts were predicting it would make.
Just five days ago, trade publications like Variety were predicting that the film—which depicts the rise of the Christian hippie movement in Southern California in the late 1960s—would gross about $6-7 million in its opening weekend.
Instead, the film grossed an estimated $15.5 million, including $3.3 million from Wednesday- and Thursday-night preview screenings.
That was easily good enough to make this film the third-highest-grossing movie of the week, behind Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (which suffered the biggest second-weekend plunge of any MCU movie ever, landing at $32.2 million) and Cocaine Bear (which beat expectations of its own with a first-weekend gross of $23 million).
Jesus Revolution also had one of the best openings ever for a “faith-based” movie.1 It’s only the sixth such film to open over $15 million, and it’s only the eleventh to open over $10 million. The film’s per-screen average of $6,272 is also at the high end for the genre.
The film’s box-office triumph also marks a return to form for Jon Erwin, who directed the film with Brent McCorkle. (Erwin directed his previous films with his brother Andrew, who has a producer credit on Jesus Revolution.)
In 2018, the Erwin brothers scored a huge box-office hit with I Can Only Imagine, a Christian-pop-music biopic that stunned the industry by opening to $17.1 million and legging out to $83.5 million overall.
One year after that success, the brothers announced a major deal with Lionsgate, the studio behind The Hunger Games and John Wick, to produce as many as two “faith-based” films per year—but the first film made under that deal, I Still Believe, came out in March 2020, the weekend the Covid lockdowns began, and their next film, American Underdog, came out at Christmas 2021, when the Omicron variant was hitting its peak.
Now, however, with Jesus Revolution, it would seem the brothers and their audience have finally put the pandemic behind them.
Jesus Revolution presumably also got a box-office boost from its tie-ins to The Chosen, the hit life-of-Jesus series that has had three successful theatrical releases in the past 15 months. Jonathan Roumie, who plays Jesus in The Chosen, plays hippie preacher Lonnie Frisbee in Jesus Revolution, and the film features at least one other nod to the series, too, which I won’t spoil here. (It’s a cute little in-joke.)
Why did Jesus Revolution do so much better than the box-office forecasts predicted?
Deadline says it helped that Jesus Revolution, like Cocaine Bear, had a “sticky title”: audiences knew exactly what they were getting. Deadline also notes:
The theory is that tracking only polled those people who had been to theaters in recent movies. That said, it’s been a while since the faith-based crowd has had a wide release like this. It’s mostly been short-run Fathom Events. Not just that, but the pic’s soundtrack is a huge magnet here as well for its followers, and Kelsey Grammer’s star power didn’t hurt. Huge amount of walk-up business here with Comscore/Screen Engine’s PostTrak showing 74% of those seeing the movie either bought their ticket the day of or the day before.
Lionsgate is already hearing from exhibition about repeat business over the weekend. And the definite recommend here on PostTrak is — well, miraculous, at 90%. You never see that on any movie, including MCU and Star Wars titles. The pic was 97% positive on PostTrak. Females over 25 led (54%), men over 25 (37%), females under 25 (6%), and guys under 25 at 3%. Can we get an Amen?
Variety notes that the film’s actual audience was 59% female and 89% over 25.
The film’s publicists also noted in a press release that co-director Jon Erwin, with this film, is now the first director ever to get four A+ CinemaScores (the other three films to get that grade were Woodlawn, I Can Only Imagine, and American Underdog):
The film also set a record this weekend: the release of Jesus Revolution marks the first time in history that a director (Jon Erwin) has scored four A+ CinemaScore Grades since the company publicly released the results in 1986.
Said Harold Mintz, President of CinemaScore: “Jon Erwin has now achieved four A+ CinemaScores, more than any other filmmaker since we have been compiling data. For a director to achieve that accomplishment once is a rarity. But to hit that mark four times is not only an incredible distinction — it’s unprecedented. Congratulations to Jon and Brent McCorkle and the entire team at Kingdom Story Company.”
Presumably audience scores like that will translate into long “legs” at the box office.
As ever, we shall see.
In the meantime, it’s worth noting that the estimates for this weekend kept creeping up as box-office reports were updated every few hours. (On Friday morning, Deadline said Jesus Revolution “potentially could hit $10M”; on Saturday morning, that became “an estimated $14.5M”; and now, today, it’s $15.5 million.) So it’s possible Jesus Revolution did even better than the current estimates suggest. The final weekend numbers will come out tomorrow, and I will update this post when they do.
February 27 update: Yep, the final numbers crept up again, to $15.8 million:
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Past posts on the Erwin brothers and Jesus Revolution:
‘Review: Moms’ Night Out (dir. Jon & Andrew Erwin, 2014)’ (May 21, 2014)
‘I Can Only Imagine and Steve McQueen: American Icon co-director Jon Erwin on rooting for the underdog and following your dreams’ (March 16, 2018)
‘A new Bible-movie trilogy is in the works from the makers of I Can Only Imagine and the studio behind The Shack’ (March 27, 2019)
‘From Jesus Christ to Jesus freak’ (September 2, 2022)
‘A new featurette gives us our first look at Jesus Revolution’ (October 8, 2022)
‘Hippies-for-Christ flick Jesus Revolution gets a trailer’ (October 22, 2022)
‘The Chosen’s successors: a new Left Behind movie and the Jesus Revolution?’ (November 22, 2022)
‘A few brief thoughts about Jesus Revolution’ (February 24, 2023)
Box Office Mojo counts the Narnia movies as “Christian” films, but I don’t, particularly; they seem to me more like big-budget fantasy adaptations à la Harry Potter, etc.