Color Me Wrong On "Fireproof"

This is a movie that is so low budget that it stars Kirk Cameron, while his female lead is an actress who took a leave of absense from performing at Disney World to do the film.

It opened on only 839 screens, and its presence out here in LA is about as small as the teeny ads for it.

I thought it would tank.

Nope.

It made $6.8 million over the weekend, good for 4th place -- and it almost edged Lakeview Terrace for third.

It did twice as much as Spike Lee's heavily-advertised movie did -- and that movie opened on almost 300 more screens.

The secret?

The Christian audience.

Filmmakers have been trying to tap into it for a while now, and there is a history of Biblical movies doing well.

But this film is different -- it's a marital drama. It's about a husband trying to save his marriage, and asking God for help.

(Though it probably helps too that he is a fireman, so they had some exciting rescue scenes to put in the trailer).

Obviously there are communities where this film is doing very well, where religious leaders are spreading the word and getting the audience out.

It'll be interesting to see if the movie has legs. Probably not; it'll be lucky if it makes much over $15 million total.

But that's good enough to inspire a flood of this kind of movie. Be interesting to see if the number of scripts I see with a religious edge (which is really extremely low) takes any kind of untick.

*******

Otherwise EAGLE EYE did a very solid $29.1 million, while NIGHTS IN RODANTHE gave a nice kick to the romance genre by bringing in a pretty impressive $13.4 million.

On the other side of the spectrum, THE LUCKY ONES, starring Tim Robbins and Rachel McAdams as veterans returning home from Iraq, opened on about half of the theaters that FIREPROOF did, and did only 1/40th of the box office, bringing in only $183,000.

The audience's near-complete disinterest in seeing anything involving the Iraq War continues.