Diarist Bruce Feirstein in the New York Observer:
So I’m sitting in a restaurant in Santa Monica on the Sunday night that Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ clocked through $200 million at the box office, after only 11 days in the theaters. Not one of the other 10 people sitting at our table had actually seen the film, despite offering vociferous opinions about it. Then the Hispanic waiter spoke up. “I loved it. I usually don’t go to movies, but I went to a matinee, on the second day.”
In Hollywood, the real question of the age isn’t “Why does a movie do $200 million at the box office?”, but rather “Why do so few of them do $200 million?” From The Passion of the Christ to My Big Fat Greek Wedding to Something’s Gotta Give, how many audiences—how many groups of people—does Hollywood overlook, or miss completely?
Still, Hollywood studies the Bible, otherwise known as Variety. And you can be certain that just as Butch Cassidy begat 48 Hrs., which begat Lethal Weapon, which begat 2,000 other buddy films, it can’t be too long before the rest of the biblical canon starts appearing on development lists, from the Cain and Abel story to Martin Luther, to Holy Moses, the Jewel of the Nile.
Until then, I’m waiting for Mel’s sequel: “He’s back. Christ Almighty! The Resurrection. This time, it’s personal.”
1:32 pm on March 11, 2004
