Monday Morning Quarterback Part II

By BOP Staff

March 25, 2015

Don't make me fall off my stool again!

New at BOP:
Share & Save
Digg Button  
Print this column
David Mumpower: Sean Penn mastered the art of beating people up many years ago. Most of the victims were paparazzi. As probably the least likable actor in Hollywood today (if not ever), he has never been a box office draw. His reputation as a thespian is overstated in my opinion, as I don’t consider a lot of his work to be acting inasmuch as him finding roles that allow him to demonstrate different douche-y aspects of his loathsome personality. In a way, he’s a true artist since he has built a career upon turning an extreme negative, his terrible attitude, into a high-profile career. I almost admire him for that, but he never was and never will be a box office draw. Attempting to steal Liam Neeson’s bit was a clever gamble, but Keanu Reeves did it oh so much better.

Kim Hollis: Do You Believe?, a religious-themed film from the same people who produced God's Not Dead last year, earned $3.6 million for the weekend. What do you think of this result?

Ryan Kyle: For a movie marketed by only a grassroots campaign and made for pennies, this is a fine debut. This Christian sub-genre seems to have a ceiling for its opening weekends in the single digits. Only a few films like last year's Heaven Is For Real and Son of God broke through to pull blockbuster numbers for Church-approved pix, but those were backed by major studios. Opening to double digits is the exception, not the rule, for this genre.




Advertisement



Edwin Davies: A lot of people have been making the comparison between Do You Believe? and God's Not Dead, but despite sharing a production company and some personnel, I think that's a little bit unfair. God's Not Dead not only was marketed through grassroots campaigning, there was also an activist quality to it. It was pretty shoddy and exploitative in the way it used the sort of stories that get sent around in emails (college professor fails students for believing in GOD!!!!!@!@) but which have never actually happened, but that evangelical quality got people fired up and made them tell their friends to go and see it (or send them idiotic text messages). Do You Believe? was a bit more amorphous, and it didn't feature a villain as mustache-twirlingly cartoonish as Kevin Sorbo to base its story around. Without that culture warrior angle, there wasn't much to distinguish it from the likes of Moms' Night Out.

David Mumpower: A friend of mine who is the target demographic for this, having watched several of the high-profile 2014 religious titles, mentioned to me that he was unaware of the existence of this one. That's in stark contrast to last year's slew of titles, most of which seemed to garner headlines well before their releases. Do You Believe? strikes me as a rather obvious cash grab rather than a movie that needed to be made, which identifies it as an unwelcome de facto sequel. It's the Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous of religious releases.

But it's always nice to see Lee Majors working.


Continued:       1       2

     


 
 

Need to contact us? E-mail a Box Office Prophet.
Thursday, March 28, 2024
© 2024 Box Office Prophets, a division of One Of Us, Inc.