November 05, 2005

Hollywood reaches out to Christians

Hollywood Finds Religion
New Movies Reach Out to Christian Audiences

HOLLYWOOD, California, NOV. 5, 2005 (Zenit.org).- Hollywood has found a new audience: Christians. Dec. 9 will see the premiere of "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," based on the C.S. Lewis book of the same title.

The market for religious-oriented media always existed. But the success of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" made a lot of people in Hollywood sit up and take note of the commercial opportunities they had been disdaining.

Plans to make a film, or a series of films, based on the Narnia series had languished in Hollywood for over a decade, the Toronto-based Globe and Mail newspaper reported Sept. 8. Disney gave the green light to the project one week after "The Passion" opened in February 2004.

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posted by Dr. Denice Hanley, DPM, M.Div. @ 2:09 PM 0 comments

"The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" to open Dec. 9

The Stepson, the Billionaire and the Walt Disney Co.

By LORNE MANLY
Published: November 6, 2005

AT the beginning of 2001, Perry Moore embarked on a forbidding quest. Mr. Moore, an executive with an untested movie company called Walden Media, dispatched an impassioned letter to the chief executive of the C. S. Lewis Company, seeking movie rights to the much-loved "Chronicles of Narnia" fantasy novels.

He vowed that Walden would be able to accomplish what one of the most prolific and successful producing teams in Hollywood - Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall of "Jurassic Park" fame - had already failed to do: turn "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," the first book published in the series, into a movie. Over the previous seven years, in a time before "The Lord of the Rings" and "Harry Potter" had shown the profit potential in family-friendly sorcery epics, every major studio in town had turned down the project, some even twice.

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posted by Dr. Denice Hanley, DPM, M.Div. @ 9:50 AM 0 comments