Movies based on Biblical stories and characters have been extremely successful in the past. However the 2016 motion picture treatment of Ben-Hur—a retelling of a best-selling novel, a long-running play, and one of the highest grossing movies in history—has met with poor box office receipts at its North American release this month. Why? In the 1950s, Biblical epics were among the most profitable movies released up to that time. And among these films are at least three in which Christianity is viewed through a positive lens. Has the appetite for ‘Jesus-friendly’ epics changed? I’ll argue that the audience for Christian-based films today is fundamentally different from sixty years ago, and this difference may be an example of a growing divergence between the secular and the religious in today’s society, especially when compared to the middle of the twentieth century.
In this piece I’ll take a look at three films, extremely successful in the past, and sympathetic to the Christian faith. They are Ben-Hur, The Robe and Quo Vadis.