This year’s biggest documentary is a liberal’s nightmare

Not long ago, documentaries topped the box office every year as well movies on everyone’s lips. think about Round dream or Roger and me or more recently, Won’t you be my neighbor?: films that attract large audiences, attract awards attention and make respectable sums of money.

List of This year’s highest-grossing documentary is a very different story Instead of the next one Gray Garden or Grizzly Bear Man, The Top 10 of 2024 is a collection of faith-oriented films, a film of praise Donald Trump, and the glorified trolls are clearly aimed at appealing to those on the right side of moderation. Several celebrity-driven projects and compilations of cat videos are on the list. At the top, place Anthony Bourdain And David Bowie Once you pass, you will find it Am I a racist?, One strange world borate-meet-Bowling for Columbine from the conservative media outlet Daily Wire.

According to most industry experts I spoke with, the wide gap between what many of us consider prestige-style documentaries and what actually ranks at the box office these days is fairly recent. . Where they disagree is Why that is. Some say studios don’t want to put more traditional material in theaters, preferring the less risky route of putting it straight onto streaming services. Others blame clearly targeted social media campaigns, of the same type spreading false information and sowing political conflict. There are still many opinions that for too long, filmmakers have not cared about the interests of the American people, and this year’s box office reflects that divide. Maybe they are all right.

“The documentary market is currently flooded,” said the film business analyst Jeff Bock. “You could call it the golden age of documentaries.” Jaie Laplante, The artistic director of DOC NYC—the country’s largest documentary film festival—agrees: “The golden age of documentary continues, it just continues in a new phase.” For that, we can thank streaming platforms, making it easier than ever for non-fiction films to be distributed and marketed straight to audiences. “I can’t imagine trying to market all of that in a theatrical way,” Bock said of number is increasing number of documentaries available to stream online.

Widely known quantity films are an exception to this rule. “Unless you are tied to an event like Taylor Swift, “It’s almost impossible to make” a successful non-fiction theatrical release, Bock said, referring to the singer Movie about 2023 era travel. (Although not classified as a documentary, that film was produced in 2023 The film has the 11th highest revenue in the country.) “Think about where media is today: It’s really dominated by IP. They know Jesus, they know God, they know the Blue Angels. They know cats. These are things we are familiar with and will spend time and money on.” Documentaries fill that need by celebrating explicit patriotism — or rejecting cultural changes — that have a built-in audience.

For studios and distributors, “anything that gets seats is really important,” Bock said. One company that seems to have figured out that equation is Fathom Events (as of January, will be renamed “Fathom Entertainment”), a distributor jointly owned by the country’s three largest movie theater chains: Cinemark, Regal and AMC. “This company was first founded many years ago with the idea that we would try to accommodate Monday through Thursday,” CEO Ray Nutt speaks to me from his Colorado office, which is decorated with framed posters of theatrical films including The chosen one—a fictionalized account of the life of Jesus Christ, which Fathom brought to light released to theaters with great success. “That has changed dramatically. I’ll be honest with you, it’s probably easier to get merchandise in theaters now that commercial production is down.”

Fathom took advantage of the struggling theater situation by bringing in films such as Thirsty Jesus: The Miracle of the Eucharist, a film that celebrates the Catholic faith boasts of one of the Mark Wahlbergbrothers as producers. Unless something happens in the next two weeks, it will end the year as the third-best non-fiction film at the box office, behind only Piece by piece, Pharrell WilliamsBiology documentaries using LEGO. (Vanity fair Contacted representative to Jesus is thirsty for comment, but no response was received as of publication time.)

Another Fathom release, The ship and the darkness, claims to prove that the biblical account of an all-encompassing flood (the ark in the title is Noah’s, not Indiana Jones’s) is correct. It was billed as the fifth highest-grossing documentary of the year.

While Nutt’s theatrical partners clearly deserve credit for bringing niche films to larger audiences, there are other ways to build audiences for religious films. like this. The company actively engages religious groups outside of the areas where Fathom’s faith-centered films are playing. “We license that content to them, to the church, and then the churches actually display that content,” Nutt said. “That’s something we feel really excited about doing, to make sure that people in smaller communities that don’t have a movie theater within a reasonable distance of their home can see our content. I.”

Church screenings, he added, “aren’t a huge revenue generator for us” — but the strategy can clearly boost a movie’s box office receipts. For a genre where most films sell thousands of tickets (if that), group ticket sales can be quite significant.

Faith-based film advocates also use social media advertising to encourage email campaigns. Rebecca Fons, program director for both Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center and Iowa Theater in the small Midwestern town of Winterset, is where the business ends of those campaigns. “You can imagine that I program really different films in Chicago than I do in Iowa,” she said. At the second location, she was encouraged to show “Trump content — or, you know, Catholic content or Christian content.”