Friday, June 23, 2006

LDS Cinema

I like movies, and I like making lists, and I like collecting movies on DVD. So, here's my page celebrating a new genre of film. Latter-day Saints have been making movies for a long time (see www.ldsfilm.com), but only recently have they begun to make movies about Mormons, mostly targeting an LDS audience. Blue text indicate titles in my collection. Films are listed in order of their popularity as defined by Total US Gross box office as reported by the numbers.com.

Latter-day Saint-themed feature films shown theatrically
The following films are listed in order of their production budgets. Box office data is not available.
I can find neither box office data nor production budget information for the following film.
  • Brigham Young: Frontiersman (20 Sep 1940) [NR] This film tells the true story of Brigham Young (Dean Jagger) and his battle to transport his people across the Rocky Mountains to settle in Salt Lake City. The plot focuses on two of his people, Jonathan Kent and Zina Webb and the hardships they have to face along the way. Technically, this is not LDS Cinema because it was not made by Latter-day Saints, but it portrayed the Latter-day Saints as heroes in their own story, and the actor who played the title character joined the Church years later.  LDS Film.com * Internet Movie DataBase.com * LDS Video Store * Review by Todd Erickson DVD Release Date:  15 Jul 2003
This page uses only one source of data to rank these movies by popularity. It also compares the budget with the ticket sales, but it would be a mistake for readers to use these two numbers to decide if a film was "successful" or "profitable." In reality, movies have a long shelf life, and fans experience them in many ways. For example, The Wizard of Oz, one of the most popular movies of all-time, was not immediately profitable. It grossed $3 million at the box office, making it a commercial "success," but during production and promotion, the budget rose to $4 million. It wasn't until 1956 when MGM struck a deal with CBS to broadcast the film every year that the film finally became "profitable." Likewise, many of these films have video rentals and sales to boost their profit margins, but the webmaster regrettably does not have access to such numbers for inclusion.

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