Hollywood is trying to play catch-up to the market "pioneered" by The Passion; The Chronicles of Narnia is the first film made and marketed somewhat following The Passon's template. But Libertas reminds us that there are significant differences between the two films:

I’m reminded of a phrase that Govindini and I have heard about a thousand times over the past year while moving in conservative film circles: ‘Passion dollars.’ Suffice it to say that lots of people are chasing these dollars these days, although not everyone seems to understand where those dollars actually came from.

Like most people, I expect The Chronicles of Narnia to do very well once it opens in December. Its success, however, will probably have little to do with what made The Passion such a unique and unexpected success. If Narnia becomes the blockbuster everyone expects it to be, it will be because its producers at Walden Media (and its distributors at Disney) are following in the footsteps of George Lucas, who with his Star Wars back in 1977 introduced to the modern cinema the mystical, Joseph Campbell-inspired ‘hero’s journey’ into fantastic realms - so familiar to us now from franchises like the Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter series. Like those franchises, the Narnia series will be presented as a lavish, effects-driven event films suitable for family viewing - something of a rarity these days, at least among live action films.

The Passion was really something else altogether - a violent, R-rated film shot in Latin and Aramaic! When I first saw it, The Passion reminded me of nothing so much as Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver - a gritty, blood-soaked, intensely personal statement about self-sacrifice. The Passion would’ve fit in beautifully during the 1970’s, perhaps Hollywood’s last great decade for personal, director-driven film. And it also fit beautifully into the post-9/11 sensibility of national self-sacrifice.

This isn’t to state any particular preference for one or the other type of film - I like both - but merely to point out that there is a great deal of variety in what one might consider a ‘Christian’ film. And I’m not even saying this as a Christian, myself, but as someone with great respect for the Christian experience and Christian contribution to this nation’s culture …

The reason why I put "pioneered" in quotation marks at the beginning of this post is that for decades, Hollywood aimed lots and lots of films at the Christian market, but it's doubtful it would have used a phrase like that. Look at all of the Cecil B. DeMille-style biblical films that Tinseltown cranked out from the 1920s to the middle of the 1960s (ending--not entirely coincidentally--about the time the Hays Office gave way to the MPAA code). More often than not, these films were commercial hits. (Few movies are entirely a guaranteed success, of course.) But for various reasons, Hollywood seemed to collectively think these films were too naive to make after the post-Easy Rider Young Turks took over Hollywood in the late '60s and early '70s. It's gratifying to see Hollywood return to these films after a 40-year hiatus.