The makers of Facing the Giants and Fireproof have another winner on their hands: Courageous, the latest film from Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Ga., earned more than $9 million over the weekend to finish No. 1 among new releases and fourth overall at the box office.
The film, which was made for just $2 million, has no movie stars, but did better than new releases starring Seth Rogen and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (50/50), Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz (Dream House), and Anna Faris and Chris Evans (What’s Your Number?). The numbers for Courageous are even more impressive considering that it played in less than half of the theaters of those other films – it opened in only 1,161 theaters, compared to 2,458 for 50/50, 2,661 for Dream House, and 3,002 for What’s Your Number? The top three films – Dolphin Tale, Moneyball, and The Lion King – all played on 2,300 screens or more. The $7,806 per-screen average for Courageous far exceeded others in the top five; The Lion King earned $4,537 per screen.
The weekend numbers beat Fireproof‘s opening weekend by $2,2 million, and make Courageous the fifth-best opening of all time for a Christian movie, behind only The Passion of the Christ and the three Narnia movies. Box Office Mojo’s Ray Subers writes, “Made outside of Hollywood without any major stars, Courageous managed to fly under most radars (including my own) until very recently. It’s unfair to ignore the vast majority of church-going Americans for whom typical Hollywood fare isn’t of great interest, though, and Sherwood Pictures has impressively found a way to mobilize this subset of the population. It will be interesting to see if Courageous can hold as well as Fireproof did when it went on to earn $33.46 million, or nearly five times its opening weekend, in 2008.”
