- After playing to the coasts, Hollywood is leaning toward faith and family-based shows and films.
- Amazon and Netflix recently announced deals for faith-based content.
- The conservative shift comes as streamers try to make every dollar count but face cultural hurdles.
This holiday season, Amazon MGM Studios is set to release “House of David,” a series with an epic production and global aspirations to match the breadth of its biblical source material. The Prime Video series will be the first to come out of Amazon’s deal with The Wonder Project, a Christian-focused production company, for faith-based films and TV shows.
“We are very excited about the scope, scale and storytelling involved with ‘House of David’ and look forward to sharing this epic and many others with our global Prime Video customers,” Vernon Sanders, head of television for Amazon MGM Studios, said in announcing the deal.
After playing to the coasts with shows that embraced progressive themes, Hollywood is leaning into broadly appealing fare. That shift has included a combination of undeniably faith-based, conservative-themed, and family-aimed entertainment, agents, producers, and industry experts say.
It’s a long way from Amazon’s early days in creating original entertainment that put it on the map, like “Transparent,” which came out in 2013 as gender issues were on the political agenda. Studios head Jennifer Salke, who came on board in 2018, said she was looking for “curated” overbroad shows and pledged to seek out projects with diverse talent.
“They’re heartland-curious,” Nick Barnes, UTA’s Nashville-based head of its Heartland division, said of the streamers. “It’s, ‘What’s our Yellowstone?’ I see cowboy boots every time I go to Los Angeles now.” The Kevin Costner-starring Western and soapy family drama has become one of TV’s most popular scripted shows.
Disney CEO Bob Iger reversed the company’s proud embrace of diverse themes after getting hammered by critics on the right, trading movies like “Zootopia,” which dealt with prejudice, for this year’s “Deadpool & Wolverine.”
Netflix, off the success of “Virgin River,” a small-town romance that was just renewed for a seventh season, recently announced a deal with Tyler Perry and DeVon Franklin to make faith-based films starting with “R&B,” a take on the biblical love story of Ruth and Boaz set in the modern-day American South. It also just acquired “Mary,” a biblical epic starring Anthony Hopkins.
Netflix has also been taking a page from the “Yellowstone” playbook with an upcoming bull-rider series called “Ragdoll,” starring country superstar (and “Yellowstone” actor) Tim McGraw. Also on tap is “American Primeval,” a miniseries it describes as a “raw, adventurous exploration of the birth of the American West.”
Economics fuel a cultural shift
The rightward tilt has a lot to do with fear and economics.
Facing big financial pressure, studios and streamers are looking to make entertainment for the most subscribers at the lowest cost possible as the cable business wanes and streaming profits have been rare. In this newly conservative greenlighting era, buyers are looking around for sure things and pockets of audiences where there’s opportunity.
Faith-based and family-oriented shows can be made relatively cheaply, without big-name stars, and have the potential to travel globally. Streamers are all in the ads business now, and advertisers like entertaining, non-polarizing content geared toward everyone in the household.
The studios and streamers have also seen breakout successes of Christian-themed titles. Angel Studios-distributed “The Chosen,” a 2017 TV drama about Jesus and his apostles from filmmaker Dallas Jenkins, is considered one of the most successful crowdfunded entertainment projects, raising nearly $100 million.
Angel Studios followed it up with “Sound of Freedom,” a 2023 thriller about child trafficking that wasn’t about religion per se but was championed by conservatives and churchgoers to become one of the most successful indie films with a $180 million domestic box office. “Jesus Revolution,” a 2023 movie by Wonder Project founder Jon Erwin about hippie Christians in California, grossed about $54 million on a $15 million budget.
UTA’s Barnes said that successes like these have encouraged top Christian filmmakers, who so far have largely operated outside the major studio system, to start talking about making TV series for distribution by major streamers, where the real eyeballs are.
Hollywood’s shift doesn’t surprise historians. For much of TV history, programming was a mass-audience proposition, family-oriented and conservative. Networks, guided by their standards divisions, programmed to reach as many people as possible and avoid turning off advertisers. TV couples slept in separate beds and faith was a big genre (1977’s “Jesus of Nazareth” and “Touched by an Angel,” which ran from 1994 to 2003, for example).
Cable and streaming gradually split those audiences into niches. Now streamers are back to serving everyone in the scramble to survive.
Take Netflix. Its growth has slowed, which is forcing it to seek out new audiences at home and abroad while selling ads and cracking down on password sharing, said Robert Thompson, a professor at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications and director of its Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture.
“Conservative, faith-based, family, is not a bad place to look,” Thompson said. “There’s a big audience that likes faith-based and family programming — it’s affirmative and not critical in lots of ways.” Not to mention the Bible offers a rich mine of storytelling. “It’s a rip-roaring set of good stories — Exodus is one of the most rollicking stories out there.”
Faith-based can mean overtly Christian, but today’s suppliers are also finding a market for premium storytelling that people in Hollywood call faith-adjacent. That’s helped them to attract mainstream backing and stars like Hilary Swank, who features in “Ordinary Angels,” a 2024 inspirational drama from Kingdom Story Co., a production company specializing in Christian films. The Wonder Project raised $75 million from backers, including Lionsgate, UTA, and horror producer Jason Blum for its faith-centric ambitions. Lionsgate has long had a filmmaking deal with Kingdom Story Co.
Still, for all the interest in serving the flyover states, proponents say change has been slow.
Studios and streamers want to serve rural America but are reluctant to touch something they consider too religious or conservative. The decision-makers are still largely bicoastal and don’t really know the audience or agree on what a “heartland” or a “family” show is. (“Modern Family” may be, but is gothy “Wednesday?”)
To those in this world, heartland means shows about universal values, neighbors helping neighbors, and offering hope. For others, it may connote far-right conservatism, an association many in Hollywood shun (See: Taylor Sheridan). “The far right has hijacked Christianity, so what constitutes family-based programming would mean very different things, depending on who you talk to,” Thompson said.
“They know faith and family and ‘Yellowstone’ is important, But the mandates come and go without a lot of acquisitions,” Barnes said of entertainment buyers. “While they understand they need this audience, they don’t understand them.”
Faced with uncertainty, it’s easier and safer for studios and streamers to fall back on familiar franchises. “They would much rather make ‘Transformers 7’ than ‘The Blind Side,'” quipped a Hollywood agent who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect relationships with the studios and networks.
According to research firm Ampere Analysis, the number of “faith and spirituality” content hours on the major US streamers roughly doubled over the past year, to about 500, but is still under 1% of their total catalog hours.
That could change as more people leave Los Angeles for states like Georgia, Texas, and Tennessee, which have growing film and TV production hubs.
“The more people come and see that the big, bad scary heartland and the South are not what they think it is, the friendlier they are to tell the story of these places,” Barnes said.
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