Hollywood loves nothing more than success. Usually when a movie goes through the roof and brings in huge profits, other studios will try to cash in by making similarly-themed films.
Passion of the Christ grossed $370,274,604 worldwide (Box Office Mojo ) but there hasn’t been a sign of major studios attempting to emulate this with other religious-themed movies (or have I just missed them?).
Any particular reason for this? Did they just figure it was an unrepeatable fluke? It just seems odd.
the main character died in the end…?? 
What? No spoiler tag for that?
He’ll be back [/arnold]
I agree that it does seem strange. Hollywood often copies itself simultaneously - Deep Impact & Armageddon, for instance. It seems to me there’s two possible issues here:
The appearance that Hollywood copies itself a lot is quite often due to the fact that studios aren’t really copying each other but rather come to the same place at the same time as a result of external forces. There was a glut of war-is-bad Vietnam pictures in the mid 80s, for instance, would would give you the (mistaken) impression that the guys who made Full Metal Jacket and Casualties of War were just copying Platoon. In reality, it’s just that it was about the time - 15 years after the fact or so - that people wanted to take a more complex look at Vietnam.
In fact, a LOT of evangelical-Christian movies are out there, you’re just not seeing them. The Left Behind series makes plenty of dough. The U.S. has entire movie industries that play to particular audiences; we had a thread a while ago about how there’s practically a while black movie industry, but I can’t find it.
So in terms of copying “The Passion of the Christ,” it’s possibly just that Hollywood has not had time to pump anything out yet. If you assume this caught them by surprise - and I admit its popularity surprised me, too, and a lot of peopl;e on the SDMB from what I remember - you have to give Hollywood 12-18 months, minimum, and maybe longer, to produce a feature film.
There’s no reason to beat a dead … er, Prince of Peace.
Does anybody got a link to that thread, or particularly good keywords to search with?
CVP: Christ vs. Predator
You’ve drunk His blood. You’ve eaten His body. Now you can watch His comeback.
I’m thinking prequels here. Maybe Joseph and Mary leaving him alone in the house by mistake, and he has to deal with burglars on Christmas. Or have him solve mysteries with his annoying nephew Scrappy of Nazereth, or something.
It could star Will Ferrell. In fact, it would kind of have to star Will Ferrell, 'cause he’s the only actor alive who would appear in it. Will Ferrell would appear in an outbreak of herpes if it gave him top billing.
Obviously, there have been many Biblical movies. I think Passion of the Christ was simply in the “right” place at the “right” time. The Religious Right was energized in 2004 with the heated Presidential election. Passion became the movie for the Red States while Fahrenheit 9/11 was the blue state movie
[Gilbert Gottfried]…and the sequel, Absolutely the Last Temptation of Christ…[/GG]
Those ‘Left Behind’ movie maybe could be considered followups.
what are you talking about? Of course there’s a sequel!. And it kicks ass!
Now that’s what I call entertainment!
I’m the first to point out when Hollywood plagiarizes itself. I always wonder what lesson Hollywood will learn from any big-budget risk like Lord of the Rings, Titanic, and other similar films.
Passion of the Christ was probably different because it was an actor’s pet project rather than an idea shopped around, and because it already had a producer/director/writer driving the picture forward. The other studios may have shied away from trying to copycat while PotC was in production because they weren’t sure how a grim and realistic depiction of torture and crucifixion might go over with audiences.
I’m a bit surprised, like the OP, that there hasn’t been some other bandwagon film released since then. Maybe with the release of Troy and Alexander they figured there’s only so much desert-and-sandal clothing the average viewer can take. Or they are developing their copycat movies, in true Hollywood fashion, but the projects haven’t yet got out of the focus group stage because the focus participants still can’t agree what color Jesus should be. (That’s one advantage of having a controversial movie subject driven by a man with a vision — he makes choices and decisions where committees do not, even if the decisions later cause controversy.) The marketing guys might not like it because you can’t exactly release Passion of the Christ action figures (but Taco Bell is now in negotiations to get them to add a fourth figure to the Trinity to make a decent 4-cup set).
As an aside, I always figured that the simultaneous-release thing was a result of inter-studio competition. It could manifest in a few ways:
Sam the Screenwriter writes a movie with a brand new and fresh idea (say, a wish-granting magic lamp found by some kid in Cincinnati) and shops his screenplay around to Paramount and 20th Century Fox. Paramount doesn’t buy the rights to it. (Maybe they didn’t like the script, or there was an actor attached to the project they didn’t like, or whatever.) They decide to write their own script about a magic wish-granting box of bagels that is found by a group of teenagers in Los Angeles. 20th Century Fox buys the rights to Magic Lamp. Alvin, the man who green-lighted the purchase, is fired by Fox. Zeke, the man hired to replace Alvin, decides to cancel the project because he’s in a lose-lose situation: if the Magic Lamp movie is a hit, it’s not to Zeke’s own credit; and if it’s a flop, he would be to blame for not canceling it. Alvin is now hired by New Line. He doesn’t have the rights to that script any more, but encourages somebody at New Line to write their own cobbled-together screenplay of a young just-married couple in New York who finds that their heirloom wedding ring is a wish-granting magic ring. Someone (say, Roger Corman) reads in trade magazines about at least two movies in development about wish-granting magic artifacts. He reads that the Magic Bagels movie is being released by Paramount in June 2008 and decides to hurry his own version to the box office by January 2008 so he can appear dynamic, fresh and original (and grab audience dollars). Corman’s version about a book of magic spells is filmed in his back yard and has a dinosaur and a strip-club scene shoehorned into it. Universal hears about Magic Lamp and realizes it has a ten-year old script sitting around along the same lines, which they purchased years ago, about a magic monkey paw that grants wishes. They dust it off and try to position themselves as doing a high-tone movie based on literature. Zeke at 20th Century Fox hears that other movies about wish-granting magic are being made and un-cancels the original script that he himself mothballed. Now he can claim some credit for making a brilliant decision. Meanwhile, Paramount has heard that there are now five movies in the works (Magic Lamp, Magic Bagels, Magic Ring, Magic Book, and Magic Paw). The market is now saturated so they kill their own project. Roger Corman hears Paramount has dropped its Magic Bagels project but he’s already halfway through principal photography on Magic Book and decides to release his anyway. New Line ends up releasing its version direct to video.
That is an almost direct rip-off of “Ghandi II” from ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic’s movie, UHF.
“No more Mr. Passive Resistance! He’s out to kick some butt!”
Since The Passion was fairly obviously a descendant of the medieval passion plays, I’ve long thought an obvious follow-up that should be done is an adaptation of one of the mystery plays focusing on Christ’s appearences after His resurrection, like The Play of the Pilgrims to Emmaus. It could start with Christ’s appearances to the myrrh-bearing women in the garden, and end with the Ascension.
The problem is that The Passion of the Christ is like Titanic from a sequel making point of view; once you’ve told the biggest story, what are you going to base a sequel on? Lusitania? The Passion of Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians?
I tell you, what I damn well want to see are some big-budget historical epics set in the Byzantine empire. Let’s have a Constantine or a Justinian or a Constantine XI Palaiologos, dammit! Why does Old Rome get all the good movies?
Not even necessarily a sequel, LittleNemo. There was no sequel to Titanic or Lord of the Rings.
The lesson Hollywood learned from Titanic:
3 hour long + historical + disaster + dash of tragic romance + special effects = huge box office success + Oscar bait = Pearl Harbor
The lesson from Lord of the Rings:
adaptation from well-known fantasy literature + epic sword-n-shield battle scenes + beefcake = Troy
Troy - beefcake = The Chronicles of Narnia
But with Bible stories:
long + grim + religious + epic = ?
What, are they gonna do an epic story about Vishnu? Are they gonna film some long epic about Mohammed? Are they going to give us “Buddha! the Musical?” “Kun-Fu-Tze Meets Frankenstein?” Naw — they’d go back to the Bible and serve up some other story… but as you point out, it’s the biggest Bible story there is (at least in the New Testament). Hard act to follow.