The
Rev. Roderick Dwayne Belin, a senior A.M.E. Church leader, stood before
a gathering of more than 1,000 pastors in a drafty Marriott ballroom in
Naperville, Ill., this month and extolled the virtues of a Hollywood
movie.
“Imagine
this clip playing to your congregation, perhaps tied to a theological
discussion about our sacred lives and our secular lives and how there is
really no division,” he said, before showing the trailer for “Hidden
Figures,” which 20th Century Fox will release in theaters nationwide on
Jan. 6.
The
film has no obvious religious message. Rather, it is a feel-good drama
about unsung black heroines in the NASA space race of the 1960s. But Fox
— working with a little-known firm called Wit PR, which pitches movies
to churches — sought out Mr. Belin to help sell “Hidden Figures” as an
aspirational story about women who have faith in themselves. He became a
proponent after a visit to the movie’s set in Atlanta, where Wit PR
invited seven influential pastors to watch filming and hang out with
stars like Kevin Costner and Taraji P. Henson, who spoke of her own struggles to succeed in Hollywood.
“I came away really interested in using film to explore faith,” Mr. Belin said.
On
the surface, Hollywood is a land of loose morals, where materialism
rules, sex and drugs are celebrated on screen (and off), and power
players can have a distant relationship with the truth. But movie
studios and their partners have quietly — very quietly, sometimes to the
degree of a black ops endeavor — been building deep connections to
Christian filmgoers who dwell elsewhere on the spectrum of politics and
social values. In doing so, they have tapped churches, military groups,
right-leaning bloggers and, particularly, a fraternity of marketing
specialists who cut their teeth on overtly religious movies but now put
their influence behind mainstream works like “Frozen,” “The Conjuring,” “Sully” and “Hidden Figures.”
The
marketers are writing bullet points for sermons, providing footage for
television screens mounted in sanctuaries and proposing Sunday school
lesson plans. In some cases, studios are even flying actors, costume
designers and producers to megachurch discussion groups.
Hollywood’s
awareness of its need to pay better attention to flyover-state
audiences has grown even more urgent of late, as ultraliberal movie
executives, shocked to see a celebrity-encircled Hillary Clinton lose
the presidential election to Donald J. Trump, have realized the degree
to which they are out of touch with a vast pool of Americans. Tens of
millions of voters did not care what stars had to say in support of Mrs.
Clinton.
Are those voters also ignoring the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Meryl Streep when they promote movies? Would they listen if it were a church leader telling them to buy a ticket instead?
Film
companies can no longer afford to take any audience for granted.
Despite a growing population, North America’s moviegoing has been more
or less flat — not exactly what investors want to hear.
Last year, 1.32
billion tickets were sold, up from the year before but down from the
10-year high of 1.42 billion in 2009, according to the Motion Picture Association of America.
More troubling, cheaper and more convenient in-home entertainment
options are threatening the grip that multiplexes have long had on young
adults; the number of frequent moviegoers ages 12 to 24 has fallen for
three consecutive years.
Hollywood is under pressure to reverse that trend. Churches may seem like an unusual path toward young people, but 41 percent of millennials
engage in some form of daily prayer, according to a 2010 Pew Research
paper. To reach them, many ministers have built vast social media
networks. The Rev. Jamal H. Bryant, a megachurch pastor in Baltimore,
has 250,000 followers on Twitter. (His church also has a smartphone app.)
Studios
used to sell movies by bombarding television networks with advertising
on the eve of release. That tactic is still used for summer
blockbusters, but it is expensive and increasingly ineffective in the
DVR age. As a result, studios are aggressively trying to plumb niche
markets that can be reached through word of mouth.
“Someone
like Jamal Bryant, because he has such a prodigious network online,
becomes a pipeline to other youth pastors,” said the Rev. Marshall Mitchell, a pastor in Jenkintown, Pa., and a founder of Wit PR.
In
the coming weeks, Mr. Bryant plans to bring up to 300 parishioners to a
Wit PR-organized screening of “Hidden Figures” in Northwest Baltimore.
Afterward, Mr. Bryant intends to lead a discussion connecting the plot
to a theological message.
“Most
studios, to be honest, have no idea how to market to us,” Mr. Bryant
said. “They’re still doing the Sammy Davis Jr. tap dance: ‘Look at me!
Aren’t you impressed?’ Well, no, not really. But if you bring us into
the tent, we are often excited to spread the word.”
People
of faith and their sheer numbers — by some estimates, the United States
has roughly 90 million evangelicals — are not a new discovery in
Hollywood. Moviedom’s leading Christian consultancy, Grace Hill Media,
was founded in 2000 by a former publicist for Warner Bros.
Studios woke
up to the power of the market in 2004, when Mel Gibson’s $30 million “The Passion of the Christ”
came out of nowhere to sell $612 million in tickets worldwide. Sony
Pictures has for years found success with low-budget religious films
like “Soul Surfer” and “Miracles From Heaven.”
What is new is the aggression and sophistication.
Even in the wake of several flops — among them this summer’s “Ben-Hur,”
which cost at least $150 million to make and market and collected $94
million — studios are working on at least a dozen movies in this arena,
including “The Star,” an animated film about the animal heroes of the
first Christmas. Last month, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer announced the
introduction of Light TV, a faith and family broadcast network. Other
media companies are considering the creation of faith-based streaming
services, essentially Netflix for the pious.
At
the same time, consultants are refining their efforts. Kevin Goetz, the
chief executive of the movie research company Screen Engine/ASI,
recently initiated a proprietary Faith Tracker that monitors moviegoing
in a sample of 800 people — evangelical, traditional Protestant,
Catholic, Jewish, Mormon and those whom he calls “spiritual but not
necessarily religious.” It’s a tool designed to help studios understand
whether their faith-based advertising and publicity efforts are
connecting with the target audience before a film’s release.
An
even bolder Screen Engine/ASI initiative involves a 1,000-member
“influencer” service made up of movie-attuned pastors. Some of those
will be invited to view unfinished films online, to offer feedback that
may help filmmakers shape them and marketers sell them.
And
film studios, desperate to assemble large crowds on opening weekends,
have newly realized that religious Americans, if approached on their own
terms, can be captured for movies that would, at first glance, seem to
be an unusual fit.
Marshall Mitchell, left, and Corby Pons are partners in Wit PR, which pitches movies to churches.
Credit
Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times
Mr. Mitchell and his Wit PR partner, Corby Pons, have recently been hired to use their clergy connections to tout “The Magnificent Seven,” a Sony remake of the classic Western; “Sully,” the Warner Bros. hit about the 2009 emergency landing of a US Airways jet in the Hudson River; and “Rules Don’t Apply,” a period romance directed by Warren Beatty.
Last
year, Wit even worked to connect an essentially profane tale, “Room,”
about a woman held prisoner as a sex slave, with Scripture. “How long, O
LORD? Will you forget me forever?” reads a discussion guide, prepared by the firm, quoting Psalm 13:1-2.
“If
you feel comfortable doing so, discuss the times in your life where you
have felt abandoned by God,” suggests the guide, alongside a photo of
the film’s star, Brie Larson.
With
the exception of crude comedies, the majority of studio offerings —
even certain R-rated horror movies — have qualities that can resonate
with faith audiences, Mr. Pons said. But the merits have to be called
out. Otherwise, Christian audiences may take one look at mainstream
marketing materials and decide that a film is not for them.
For instance, Fox broadly positioned “The Revenant”
as bloody revenge thriller, but Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Pons emphasized
themes of man’s inhumanity toward his fellow man and honor versus greed.
The R-rated movie collected $533 million worldwide for Fox.
“It’s
amazing watching people in Hollywood discover there is interest in
their content they never knew existed,” Mr. Pons said. “On the faith
side, some people are surprised to learn that, hey, there is good
content coming from studios. Hollywood isn’t always the enemy.”
Movie executives tend to view the Christian audience as monolithic. It is not, of course. That may be why “Noah”
sold fewer tickets in 2014 than Paramount had hoped. The studio figured
the big-budget movie about the biblical figure would attract religious
viewers en masse, but “Noah” landed poorly
with more literal interpreters of Scripture, who objected to the film’s
depiction of fallen angels as “Transformers”-style rock monsters.
The
increasing number of consultants arriving in Hollywood to help
forestall such problems — for fees starting at about $300,000 per film
and going up to $3 million — is also leading to gridlock at church
offices. Some megachurch pastors, for instance, complain that they are
being inundated with film-related requests.
“Nobody
wants to feel used, and sometimes the movie business acts like people
of faith are there to be turned on and off as the marketers see fit,”
said DeVon Franklin, an ordained minister, an author and a producer of films like “Miracles From Heaven.”
Undoubtedly
aware of that perception, studios try to keep a tight lid on their
efforts, sometimes even insisting that no faith outreach is happening on
behalf of a film, when there is actually a coordinated effort. Studios
live in equal fear that obvious appeals to religious audiences will
alienate more secular ticket buyers. Almost all studio executives
contacted for this article rejected repeated interview requests, citing
policies not to publicly discuss marketing strategies of any kind.
But
the basic rules in selling a film are the same, said Jonathan Bock, the
founder of Grace Hill, which has quietly marketed movies to spiritually
minded people, including “Man of Steel.” “What religious people want most when they go to the movies, like people who aren’t religious, is to be entertained,” he said.
For
decades, religious audiences had little tolerance for many of the
movies produced by Hollywood. By the 1990s, when films like Quentin
Tarantino’s violent “Pulp Fiction” entered the mainstream, the culture
gap seemed unbridgeable.
But
a pronounced swing toward family fare, helped by a growing overseas
appetite for animation and PG- or PG-13-rated superhero fantasies,
opened the door to new connections between Hollywood and faith
audiences. If “The Passion of the Christ” showed that a mass audience
existed for overt religious stories on screen, “The Blind Side,”
a 2009 family sports drama about a young black man taken in by a white
family, showed the promise of less obvious storytelling.
The
$29 million film took off at the box office (ultimately selling $309
million in tickets). Mr. Bock and Grace Hill circulated film clips and
sermon outlines to 22,000 pastors, some of whom preached its story of
personal determination and racial conciliation. One suggested “sermon
starter” involved a scene where the lead character, played by Sandra
Bullock, abruptly persuades her husband to stop their car and offer a
young man a ride.
“Has God ever nudged your heart?” the notes read.
Mr.
Bock, who is Presbyterian, is credited with being the first Hollywood
marketer to realize that churches had started to install enormous
screens to use during their services, sometimes just to display hymn
lyrics. More recently, $35,000 video walls
have become more common in sanctuaries.
“It makes church feel more
contemporary,” Mr. Bock said, adding that ministers are becoming adept
at “building vibrant social media communities that expand their reach
far beyond Sunday morning.”
Sony’s faith-based unit, Affirm Films,
has lately been working to tap Christian audiences overseas, an area
that studios have largely ignored. “There are pockets of evangelical
Protestants around the world, but it takes a lot of preplanning,” said Rich Peluso,
a Sony executive vice president. “You have to develop a relationship
with them.” In some cases, Sony has bypassed film distributors and made
release deals for dramas like the prayer-focused “War Room” with
Christian media companies in countries including Italy and Australia.
“People
are sometimes surprised to find me, a conservative Christian guy,
working in Hollywood,” Mr. Peluso said. “There are a lot of us,
actually. More than people think.”
“Hidden
Figures,” produced by Chernin Entertainment and Levantine Films for
about $25 million, after accounting for tax credits, has been marketed
with all of the usual Hollywood bells and whistles.
A trailer came out in August. In September, Fox staged a publicity stunt at the Toronto International Film Festival, showing 20 minutes of the film followed by a free concert by Pharrell Williams, who contributed to the score. Another trailer
followed. Ads popped up on TV, billboards, bus shelters, websites. Fox,
which is releasing the film in 15 cities on Christmas Day, also lined
up a partnership with Pepsi and has backed the film with a robust Oscar campaign.
So why also employ Wit?
Elizabeth
Gabler, the president of Fox 2000, the studio division behind “Hidden
Figures,” said in a statement, “Corby and Marshall help to locate these
important faith audiences and leaders who are hungry for aspirational
content without feeling like they are going to church.”
Mr.
Mitchell, 46, and Mr. Pons, 39, went to work early last year, reading
the “Hidden Figures” script, written by Theodore Melfi and Allison
Schroeder (and based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s book). They decided that
this film, because it was not overtly religious, needed to be “poured
with Dixie cups instead of buckets,” as Mr. Pons put it. Translation:
Spread the word by facilitating discussion rather than hammering home a
message through blanket ads in Christian publications.
“We
see this as a healing movie,” Mr. Mitchell said. “At a moment when so
many people — right and left, black and white — are arguing over what
America is or what America isn’t, here is a chance to come together in a
theater and look up, to space quite literally in this case, but
metaphorically too.”
Wit
PR operates with one foot inside Hollywood and one foot out. Mr. Pons,
lanky and self-deprecating, lives in Los Angeles with his wife and is
the five-person company’s primary contact with studios. He works from a
home office. Prone to folksy sayings that charm the slick Hollywood
crowd — “your cheese done slid off your cracker” is a frequent one and
means “you’re out of your mind” — Mr. Pons grew up in the rural North
Carolina hills, where his parents run the Christian Training Center International.
Mr.
Mitchell, quick-witted and single, operates from an office near the
historic Salem Baptist Church in Jenkintown, Pa., a Philadelphia suburb;
he has served as the church’s pastor since 2012. He sometimes speaks
with the fiery conviction of a preacher but has a secular background.
His résumé includes a stint as a senior enrollment and operations
official at Wilberforce University in Ohio.
The two men met in Washington. Mr. Mitchell, already at Wilberforce, had served as chief of staff to the Rev. Floyd Flake,
then a New York congressman and now senior pastor at a Queens
megachurch.
Mr. Pons was a young aide to a North Carolina congressman,
helping him to scrutinize public relations efforts around the Iraq war,
work that ended up as part of a Rolling Stone exposé.
In
2008, along with a third friend, they formed a publicity company called
Different Drummer. Mr. Pons and Mr. Mitchell split from that firm in
2014 and founded Wit PR, picking a name that is meant to convey smarts
but also stands for “whatever it takes.”
That
kind of gumption was recently on display on a Wit PR conference call.
The principals were going through a list of “activations” planned for
“Hidden Figures.” Mr. Mitchell announced that he had just arranged with
two Christian sororities to bring students and alumnae together for
“Hidden Figures” screenings and discussions on opening weekend.
“Through
those faith relationships, we’re going to end up selling at least 1,000
tickets,” he said.
“Delivering a measurable result like that is the
goal.”
Michael Cieply contributed reporting.
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