Fox catering to Christians

LOS ANGELES — Hollywood took another step toward America's vast and apparently growing Christian audience on Tuesday, as 20th Century Fox unveiled a new division, FoxFaith, that will release up to a dozen religious-oriented films each year.

Many of the films, with budgets ranging from about $3 million to $20 million each, will be released straight to DVD. But the studio said that at least six a year would be released nationally in theaters by an independent distributor working with Fox, starting on Oct. 6 with "Love's Abiding Joy," a western based on the novel by the Christian writer Janette Oke about a couple facing the trials of life on the American frontier.

"What we're trying to do is create great movies that are story-driven, that happen to tap into Christian values," said Simon Swart, the general manager of Fox's North American home entertainment division. "The genesis of the FoxFaith banner is that it's a Good Housekeeping seal, a marketing umbrella for these pictures, so that people can have confidence the movies won't violate their core beliefs."

The move reflects the growing weight of evangelical Christians in popular culture. It is the latest in a series of incremental steps taken by Hollywood studios in recent years to capitalize on the Christian audience.

FoxFaith grew out of Fox's home entertainment division, which had huge success with the DVD of "The Passion of the Christ," Mel Gibson's controversial drama about the Crucifixion, selling 15 million units. After that film became a blockbuster hit in 2004, Hollywood studios, which had traditionally shied away from overtly religious messages, began cautiously creating alliances with Christian movie producers and consultants, mostly through their home entertainment divisions.

At Sony, Peter Lalonde of the Christian-oriented Cloud Ten Pictures worked with the home entertainment division to make and release "Left Behind III: The World at War," the third in a series based on the popular end-of-times books by Timothy LaHaye, which went straight to DVD last year. The studio will also be releasing films by Provident Films, a Christian production company, starting with "Facing the Giants," an inspirational story about a small-town football team, to be released in about 30 theaters on Sept. 29.

The Walt Disney Co. has gone after the Christian audience on a more ambitious scale, and successfully courted that audience ahead of the release of its big-budget epic "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe" last December. That film, which the studio showed to religious leaders ahead of the release because of its Christian themes, took in $744 million at the worldwide box office.