Coming Soon to a Church Near You

Bill Anderson, president of the 2,200-member Christian Booksellers Association, said sales of Christian books, music, DVDs, apparel and gifts now exceed $4 billion a year. "More and more, churches have become gathering places that offer a panoply of services, and one of them is retail," he said.

Among evangelical Christians, the marketing rush often excites conflicting emotions: pride and excitement about the burgeoning Christian marketplace and how it might influence the wider culture, combined with anxiety about the commercialization of religion and how Hollywood might corrupt unwary churches.

"With 330,000 churches in America, it's potentially the largest distribution network in the country and probably in the world," said A. Larry Ross, president of a Dallas public relations and marketing firm with many evangelical Christian clients. "But most pastors are all about changing lives, so they're going to be resistant if it's a product that does not have an evangelistic message."

Peter and Paul Lalonde, the brothers who produced all three of the Left Behind movies, say their primary goal is to save souls, not to make money.

"I tell everyone, the most important 10 minutes of this movie is not on film. It's when the pastor gets up afterwards and shares the gospel with the people who are there and invites them to make a decision for Christ," said Peter Lalonde, an evangelical Christian whose own conversion occurred 22 years ago after seeing a Billy Graham film, "The Prodigal."

But while "I have my religious reasons" for releasing the film in churches, he added, "as a businessman, I also have reasons."

Starring Academy Award winner Louis Gossett Jr. as the president of the United States facing a World Government headed by the antichrist, "World at War" is the first film by the Lalonde brothers' independent production company, Cloud Ten Pictures, that has been fully underwritten by a major Hollywood studio. Peter Lalonde said Sony Pictures has spent less than $12 million to produce, promote and distribute the film, much less than for the average Hollywood release.

"In 2003, the average studio film cost $38 million to put in theaters. That's just for prints and advertising," Lalonde said. "The average [box office] take was $18 million, and the studio only gets half of that. So the average studio film in 2003 lost $29 million in theaters."

The reality of the movie business today, Lalonde said, is that "80 percent of studio profits come from DVD," and theater showings are a loss-leader that builds word-of-mouth to drive the all-important DVD and video sales.

"So how does the small guy compete?" Lalonde asked rhetorically. "While we're not making any money on the church release, we're not starting out $29 million in the hole either. Putting it in churches allows us to create a large national release and build interest in the DVD, which is where we'll make a profit, if we make a profit."

Thirty-two hundred churches, he noted, represents more locations, in more Zip codes, than all the major theater chains combined. By comparison, "The Fog," last week's No. 1 film at the box office, opened on 2,972 screens, while "Elizabethtown" opened on 2,517.

Lalonde said he hopes to follow on the success of "World at War" by distributing 10 movies a year through churches, reviving what was a common practice in the 1950s and 1960s, when many churches held a monthly movie night.

"When 'The Passion' came out, there was this great hope that Hollywood had discovered Christianity," he said. "But it hasn't happened. They are selling Hollywood films to the Christian marketplace, not making genuinely Christian films in Hollywood."

As an example, Lalonde cited the 2001 boat racing movie "Madison," starring James Caviezel, who played Jesus in "The Passion."

" 'Madison' was marketed to the Christian community on the sole basis that it had Jim Caviezel in it, but other than that, there was nothing particularly Christian about it," he said. "My conclusion is that, if we're going to have a viable system for the distribution of evangelical Christian movies, we have to build it ourselves."