Box office: The Forge can't quite revive the ailing "faith-based" genre

The Forge had one of the stronger openings of any "faith-based" film this decade, but also one of the weakest openings of any film by the Kendrick brothers.

War Room star Miss Clara (Karen Abercrombie, centre) returns in The Forge, a film about a teenaged boy (Aspen Kennedy, right) who needs mentorship.

There are a few things to highlight this week, but the big one, for me, is The Forge.

It’s the latest film from the Kendrick brothers, a couple of former pastors who have been making hugely profitable low-budget movies-with-a-message—what I sometimes refer to as church dramas writ large—for over 20 years now. Alex Kendrick directs, Stephen Kendrick produces, and both brothers write the films.

(I’ve interviewed them multiple times since their second film, Facing the Giants, came out in 2006. Click here, here, and here for links to some of those articles.)

Their biggest film to date is 2015’s War Room, a movie about prayer—the title alludes to “spiritual warfare”—that opened to $11.3 million and went on to gross $67.8 million, i.e. six times its opening, an almost unheard-of multiple in this day and age.

At the time, that was enough to make War Room the third-highest-grossing “faith-based” film of all time, and it still ranks in the top four, behind The Passion of the Christ, Heaven is for Real, and I Can Only Imagine. Produced for only $3 million, it’s also arguably the most successful “faith-based” film that has ever been made without mainstream movie stars, either behind the camera or in front of it.¹

War Room came out at a time when “faith-based” films were thriving. But the genre has been struggling ever since the Covid pandemic began a few years later.

By my count, at least fourteen “faith-based” films grossed over $30 million in the decade before the pandemic. Five of them grossed over $60 million, and a sixth, 2014’s Son of God, came very very close to that, even though it was basically just an edited version of a popular TV series that was already available on DVD.

But in the four and a half years since the pandemic? Only one “faith-based” film has made it to $30 million—i.e. last year’s Jesus Revolution—and none have gotten to $60 million. The Chosen is this decade’s TV-show-on-the-big-screen success story, but not one of its seven theatrical releases has gotten to $15 million, despite the fact that all but one of them have consisted of all-new footage. A few high-profile films, like Big George Foreman and Journey to Bethlehem, have basically flopped outright.

So I was curious to see how The Forge would do. It’s the first full-fledged Kendrick brothers film in five years, and their movies have always appealed to their audience in a way that some of the slicker “faith-based” films don’t. It’s also sort of a sequel or spin-off to War Room that brings back a few of that film’s characters, including the popular “prayer warrior” Miss Clara (played by Karen Abercrombie).

Would The Forge succeed where other recent “faith-based” films have struggled?

The answer is… not quite.

The Forge landed in 5th place this weekend with an estimated $6.6 million, which is the weakest opening of any film directed by Alex Kendrick since 2006’s Facing the Giants. The slide in revenue is all the more striking because this film had the widest opening of any Kendrick brothers film to date (1,818 theatres).

On the other hand, The Forge also had the fifth-best opening of any “faith-based” film since the pandemic began, and it did better in its first weekend than most of The Chosen’s theatrical releases, and better than much-hyped films with relatively big stars like Ordinary Angels and American Underdog. So it’s doing pretty well relative to other current films. It’s just not taking the genre back to the way things were.

The real question now is what kind of “legs” The Forge will have. The typical Kendrick brothers movie makes four to five times its opening weekend; that would give The Forge a total gross in the $26-33 million range (the upper edge of which would be on par with the $33-35 million grosses of Fireproof, Courageous, and Overcomer).

But if it performs like most “faith-based” films this decade, it will gross only two or three times its opening, and land somewhere in the $13-20 million range.

Time will tell.

In the meantime, a few of this week’s other highlights:

• Deadpool & Wolverine reclaimed the top spot this week, becoming the first film to be #1 four times since last year’s Barbie and the first to be #1 in its fifth week of release since Avatar: The Way of Water over a year and a half ago.

• It Ends with Us passed Green Lantern to become Blake Lively’s biggest film ever in North America (her voice-only cameo in Deadpool & Wolverine excepted).

• Blink Twice had one of the worst openings of any Channing Tatum film.

• The Crow had the worst theatrical opening of any film in the franchise even before taking up to 30 years of inflation into account.

• Inside Out 2 is now the first film to be in the top ten for 11 weeks since Migration, and the 12th film ever to gross a billion dollars outside of North America.

• The 15th-anniversary re-release of Coraline is now on the verge of passing the 2022 re-release of Avatar to become the top-grossing re-release since the 3D-conversion craze of 2009-2013. Coraline is also on the verge of passing Chicken Run to become the top-grossing stop-motion film in North America.

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