From Noah to Moses, Why the Renewed Interest in Bible Films? 80 Million Tickets

FINANCIAL TIMES
By Randy Bagoda

Charlton Heston as Moses in Cecil B de Mille’s ‘The Ten Commandments’ (1956)

HOLLYWOOD---There hasn’t been this much Hollywood interest in biblical material since the last midcentury, when movies such as Quo Vadis (1951), The Robe (1953), The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur, Solomon and Sheba, The Big Fisherman (all released in 1959), and King of Kings (1961) came out to popular and critical success, establishing what we now expect from Bible movies: that they be outsized spectacles of event and feeling, frequently melodramatic, and occasionally lurid, but usually respectful of their source material. Market opportunism is clearly one of the factors informing Hollywood’s latest come-to-Jesus moment. There are 80 million conservative evangelical Christians in the US alone. [link]