Peter Thompson

Ya know what, I'm not done. Another business facet to this is how parted out movies are. I was an extra in a Christian movie in high school. My "uncle" starred in it. The premier version was different than the DVD release version. Why? I'm so glad you asked.

The Truth About Why Christian Movies are So Bad. I’ve spent the last four years building a streaming platform and talking to people at the very top of the faith-based entertainment industry. Studio heads. Distributors. Producers. Investors. And I’ve come to a conclusion that I think is going to make a lot of people uncomfortable. Christian movies are bad on purpose. The talent is out there. I’ve met them. I’ve sat with them at 3am over whiskey and cigars listening to pitches that should have been picked up immediately. So that left a question that any Christian filmmaker could quickly answer. If the talent is there, why is everything so mediocre? It starts with an avatar named Bookstore Betty. I’m not making that up. When the faith-based film industry was being built out, it was done in partnership with Christian bookstore executives. They weren’t asking “how do we make great cinema.” They were asking “who walks into our stores and how do we sell them a movie the same way we sell them a devotional.” The target was a 35 year old woman. The tone, the casting, the conflict resolution, the soft lighting, all of it was reverse-engineered to appeal to Betty. Not to a general audience. Not to men. Not to teenagers. Just Betty. Every major Christian film you can think of relies on distribution deals with secular studios. The same studios that blacklisted almost everyone who worked on The Passion of the Christ and refused to distribute Kirk Cameron's Pro Life movie. Think about that. Passion made over $600 million on a $30 million budget. The most obvious play would have been to duplicate that movie hundreds of times like it was the MCU. But instead of greenlighting more, Hollywood blacklisted the people involved. So what did they do instead? They set up a system where they get to be the gatekeepers. They only greenlight the safest, most formulaic, most non-threatening stuff possible. Because if Christian films ever started consistently competing with mainstream entertainment, those studios would have a real problem. So they make sure that never happens. And the church helps them do it. Christian movies don’t need word of mouth. They don’t need to be good. They need pastors to bulk-buy tickets. You make a movie with a “message,” market it to churches, and pastors subsidize the whole thing by buying hundreds of tickets to hand out on Sunday. You don’t have to compete in a fair market when your distribution model is guilt-driven generosity. And the funding is even more rigged. Most of these films are funded through Donor Advised Funds, which means donors get a tax write-off for their “investment” regardless of whether the movie makes a dollar. There’s no market pressure to make something good. The donors got their deduction. The studio got their budget. And Betty got another movie about a woman who finds a journal in the attic. What would happen if someone actually came along and made faith-based content that created pop culture instead of reacting to it? I think it would instantly expose how low-effort the current industry is. It would be like when Uber showed up and embarrassed the taxi industry overnight. The monopoly only survives because nobody has disrupted it yet. The talent is there. The audience is there. The only thing missing is capital that wants disruption instead of a tax write-off.

The Truth About Why Christian Movies are So Bad. I’ve spent the last four years building a streaming platform and talking to people at the very top of the faith-based entertainment industry. Studio heads. Distributors. Producers. Investors. And I’ve come to a conclusion that I think is going to make a lot of people uncomfortable. Christian movies are bad on purpose. The talent is out there. I’ve met them. I’ve sat with them at 3am over whiskey and cigars listening to pitches that should have been picked up immediately. So that left a question that any Christian filmmaker could quickly answer. If the talent is there, why is everything so mediocre? It starts with an avatar named Bookstore Betty. I’m not making that up. When the faith-based film industry was being built out, it was done in partnership with Christian bookstore executives. They weren’t asking “how do we make great cinema.” They were asking “who walks into our stores and how do we sell them a movie the same way we sell them a devotional.” The target was a 35 year old woman. The tone, the casting, the conflict resolution, the soft lighting, all of it was reverse-engineered to appeal to Betty. Not to a general audience. Not to men. Not to teenagers. Just Betty. Every major Christian film you can think of relies on distribution deals with secular studios. The same studios that blacklisted almost everyone who worked on The Passion of the Christ and refused to distribute Kirk Cameron's Pro Life movie. Think about that. Passion made over $600 million on a $30 million budget. The most obvious play would have been to duplicate that movie hundreds of times like it was the MCU. But instead of greenlighting more, Hollywood blacklisted the people involved. So what did they do instead? They set up a system where they get to be the gatekeepers. They only greenlight the safest, most formulaic, most non-threatening stuff possible. Because if Christian films ever started consistently competing with mainstream entertainment, those studios would have a real problem. So they make sure that never happens. And the church helps them do it. Christian movies don’t need word of mouth. They don’t need to be good. They need pastors to bulk-buy tickets. You make a movie with a “message,” market it to churches, and pastors subsidize the whole thing by buying hundreds of tickets to hand out on Sunday. You don’t have to compete in a fair market when your distribution model is guilt-driven generosity. And the funding is even more rigged. Most of these films are funded through Donor Advised Funds, which means donors get a tax write-off for their “investment” regardless of whether the movie makes a dollar. There’s no market pressure to make something good. The donors got their deduction. The studio got their budget. And Betty got another movie about a woman who finds a journal in the attic. What would happen if someone actually came along and made faith-based content that created pop culture instead of reacting to it? I think it would instantly expose how low-effort the current industry is. It would be like when Uber showed up and embarrassed the taxi industry overnight. The monopoly only survives because nobody has disrupted it yet. The talent is there. The audience is there. The only thing missing is capital that wants disruption instead of a tax write-off.

78% Gen-Z can spot AI-generated images and it hurts conversion (one marketer saw click-through-rates fall 40% when it tried AI-generated lifestyle images)