God’s Not Dead: A Film Review Essay

The Pure Flix Entertainment production God’s Not Dead has done remarkably well at the box office for a “Christian drama film,” ranking 4th in the U.S. on its opening weekend and turning an approximately $2 million budget into a gross of over $50 million to date. Heck, it even made it to theatres as far north as Winnipeg, Manitoba, where I caught its name in bright lights, nestled in between Johnny Depp’s latest sci-fi drama, Transcendence, andCaptain America: The Winter Soldier.

The same curiosity that led me to the cinema remains as I type out a first draft of this review essay upon returning home: how is a low budget, niche market film with a hackneyed narrative doing so well?

While I can only offer a few preliminary thoughts here, I suspect that the timing of its release on March 21, 2014, just prior to the release of Aronofsky’s Noah and nearly one month after the $22 million History Channel adaption Son of God, has lent it some rather fortunate by proxy publicity, especially among conservative evangelical audiences to which the film was primarily targeted.

Pure Flix Entertainment, which defines itself in opposition to Hollywood, had the filmscreened for 8,000 pastors two months prior to its debut and conducted an aggressive media blitz on Internet radio sites like Pandora, which features Christian rock bands such as Newsboys, who appear at the film’s end. A cameo by Willie and Korie Robertson of “Duck Dynasty” fame also helped to boost its profile among certain Christian communities. According Pure Flix co-founder David A.R. White, recent homophobic remarks by family patriarch Phil Robertson in an interview with GQ may have even contributed to the film’s success:

That incident greatly elevated the family’s profile among Christian conservatives and heightened interest in “God’s Not Dead,” White said.

“It couldn’t have been better for us,” he said.

Read the rest here