Hollywood Turning Conservative? Report Finds Biggest Box Office Hitters Boast Christian Values
Movieguide.org, a website with critical reviews of movies serving as a family guide to entertainment, celebrates its 20th anniversary with an awards show airing on The Hallmark Channel Friday night, and will make available a 76-page report to support its case that Americans want to watch strong, conservative movies with Christian values -- and will pay to watch them.
The 20th Annual Faith & Values Awards Gala and Report to the Entertainment Industry will honor the best movies of 2011, with the report detailing how films with patriotic, family-strong messages attract more viewers and dollars at the box office than their do their liberal counterparts, The Hollywood Reporter shared.
People interested in the detailed report will have to pay $1,000 for a copy, but it will also come with tickets to the Faith & Values Awards Gala held at the Universal Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles.
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Movieguide judges films based on how closely they adhere to Christian principles, and looks at whether they promote American "ideals" like capitalism (as opposed to socialism), as well as how movies portray issues dealing with violence, sex and homosexuality.
In the report, movies such as "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close," "Battle: Los Angeles," "Moneyball," "We Bought a Zoo" and "Hugo" are noted as some of the positive, family-friendly movies with relatively conservative viewpoints that also make big money in Hollywood.
Films such as "Super 8," "Red State," "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy," "We Need to Talk About Kevin," "Bad Teacher" and "Happy Feet Two," were noted in the Movieguide report as being more liberal and being less financially lucrative than more conservative films.
The report supposedly concludes that seven out of 2011's top 10 films had a "strong or very strong Christian, biblical, moral and redemptive content" message, and the 91 movies that it reviewed that scored high in conservative/moral categories scored on average a $59 million box office profit apiece. The 105 movies liberal movies Movieguide noted, however, earned an average of just $11 million per film.
"Most moviegoers want good to conquer evil, truth to triumph over falsehood, justice to prevail over injustice and true beauty to overcome ugliness," Ted Baehr, Movieguide editor, wrote in the report.
The Movieguide.org rates movies on family content based on four separate categories – Language (profanity), Violence, Sex and Nudity, with each having four severity levels – None, Light, Moderate and Heavy.
Some of the movies identified in the entertainment report as "conservative" or "liberal" do not precisely match the ratings the same movies have received on Movieguide's website, however.
In comparing "Battle: Los Angeles" (a "conservative" movie) and "Super 8" (a 'liberal' movie,) two films that deal with aliens attacking Earth, they score almost identically in the content categories – both had no nudity, moderate levels of violence, and heavy uses of language – "Super 8," however, had no sex scenes, while "Battle: Los Angeles" scored "light" in that category – technically making the "liberal" "Super 8" more family friendly than the conservative "Battle of Los Angeles."
"Even better, it's a very positive salute to the U.S. Marine Corps. In fact, we haven't seen this good, inspiring and patriotic war movie in years," the review of "Battle: Los Angeles" on Movieguide.org stated, revealing that it might be its strongly patriotic message that really made the difference between its conservative and liberal identification.
An even stronger example is "Happy Feet Two," the 3D animated penguin movie which received a near perfect score for family-friendly content on the website (featuring only light levels of violence,) yet was accused of being one the most left-leaning liberal movies out there.
"It has a blatant politically correct, environmentalist message. It also promotes homosexual same-sex partnerships and homosexual adoption, a lynchpin in today's liberal identity politics. Finally, it also preaches magical or wishful thinking where people can change the future with their minds and a liberal, humanist view of evolutionary change. Media-wise parents will want to protect their children from the politically correct propaganda of HAPPY FEET TWO," the review warns.
The report, as well as other Christian and conservative sources have strongly opposed liberal children's movies in particular, because of the danger that they might influence young minds more easily.
The 20th Annual Faith & Values Awards Gala takes place tonight, Feb. 10 at the Universal Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles, and will be hosted by Dean Cain, the actor who played "Superman" in the 1993 television series "Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman." Award presenters include Joe Mantegna, Corbin Bernsen, Kevin Sorbo and Pat Boone, among others.
The awards will be divided across a number of categories, with two of the main ones being the "10 Best Films for Family Audiences" and the "10 Best Films for Mature Audience. "The full list of awards and nominees can be found on the Movieguide's official awards website.
