Never on a Sunday

A really interesting pattern has developed over the past two weekends among the movie-going population. The two biggest films out right now, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and King Kong have been trading back and forth the top spot on various days. The Narnia movie has, to the delight of some and the amazement of others, outsold the big ape remake overall, and may actually outdraw the latest Harry Potter movie when all is said and done. (Which would truly be a shock to Hollywood.)

Anyhow, the pattern for the last two weekends is this: on Friday and Saturday, LWW outdrew KK; on Sunday, the ape climbed over the lion to the top of the heap. Apparently enough of the audience for the C S Lewis classic goes to church instead of to the theater on Sundays to hold down the take at the box office. This is by no means earthshaking, but it did catch my interest.

On a larger (but related) societal note, there can now be no doubt that there is a market for Christian/religious films that take both the subject and the audience seriously. It would be nice to think that the powers that be would notice this, but probably not. Instead we're more likely to get the same reaction Pauline Kael (film critic for the New York Times) had to Richard Nixon's landslide reelection in 1972: "I don't see how he could have won...no one I know voted for him."