WILL GOLDEN COMPASS BE THE NEXT LORD OF THE RINGS? - PART FOUR

In a recent speech Pullman, author of The Golden Compass, declared: “We're used to the Kingdom of Heaven, but you can tell from the general thrust of the book that I'm of the devil's party, like Milton. And I think it's time we thought about a republic of Heaven instead of the Kingdom of Heaven. The King is dead. That's to say I believe the King is dead. I'm an atheist.”

But will religious controversy necessarily be bad for business? Not if the Da Vinci Code is anything to go by. After all, Dan Brown’s best-selling anti-Catholic book The Da Vinci Code is an international publishing and movie juggernaut.

Within three years of publication Brown’s novel was a worldwide bestseller that has been translated into 44 languages with more than 60.5 million copies in print! In 2006, in its opening weekend, the movie version earned over $224 million worldwide, second only to the opening of 2005's Star Wars flick, Revenge of the Sith. This is in spite of several Catholic bishops calling for a boycott of the film and protesters at several movie theatres across the States on opening weekend. Protesters may also have turned up as far a field as Athens, Greece and the movie may have banned in Manila and slammed with an R18 rating in the Philippines, but nothing could prevent The Da Vinci Code from becoming that year’s second highest grossing hit movie worldwide: by end-2006 it had grossed a whopping $756 270 019!

On the surface it would seem that that religious controversy doesn’t seem to hurt ticket sales at all, especially when one also considers the huge success of the Harry Potter movies. On the other hand, in recent years Hollywood has discovered the market once again for movies aimed at traditionally Christian audiences following The Passion of the Christ.

Mel Gibson’s movie was a huge box office success. Made for a mere $30 million using some of Gibson’s own money, it went on to score $370 million in the U.S. alone. Marketing the Narnia movie to Christian audiences in addition to the usual science fiction and fantasy crowd also paid off well — it made an impressive $291 million at the U.S. box office alone.

Alienating this potential audience might actually hurt potential profits. New Line is most likely hoping for those same audiences that made Narnia such a box office hit. Except Disney lured those audiences into cinemas by trumpeting the fact that Narnia author C.S. Lewis was a devoted Christian and Pullman isn’t exactly Lewis. (Pullman has in actual fact recently criticised Lewis and his work as being “blatantly racist” and “monumentally disparaging of women.”)

Will New Line’s $150 million gamble pay off? Only time will tell, but one thing is certain though: you wouldn’t want to be working for New Line’s PR and marketing division right now . . .

Originally published in the November issue of SACM. Reprinted with kind permission.