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Amid another difficult year for cinemas, the small speciality distributor Fathom Events has enjoyed a 45 per cent rise in revenue driven by religious programming, anime and old movies instead of big-budget releases from Hollywood.
The company’s hits this year include faith-based titles The Chosen, which has drawn religious audiences that might avoid mainstream movies with profanity or racy content. “Faith has been a big category for us,” says Ray Nutt, chief executive.
Colorado-based Fathom’s success in drawing audiences who crave religious content comes as Hollywood executives are asking whether they need to adjust their programming to reach a middle American market following Donald Trump’s decisive election victory.
“There’s a lot of people that aren’t in New York and LA and we’ve got to make sure we’re making movies and TV shows for everyone,” says one executive.
Nutt pointed to the success this year of The Chosen, an eight-episode series about the life of Jesus Christ that grossed more than $31mn at the box office, despite being available for free on its own streaming app. Response from Christian audiences was strong, thanks in part to the company’s outreach to churches and “religious influencers” who helped get the word out.
“People looked at us like we had two heads and said: ‘that will never work in a movie theatre’. But we knew the audience,” Nutt said. “People bought tickets in droves to see it. It says something about the moviegoing experience and people wanting to gather communally.”
Fathom’s revenues of $145mn set a record for the 20-year old company, though they are roughly equivalent to Universal’s marketing budget for its latest blockbuster, Wicked. But Fathom’s growth has outperformed that of the broader box office, which is down from 2023 due to a shortage of movies early in the year caused by the Hollywood strikes.
So far the US box office has grossed $7.8bn with less than three weeks left to match or exceed last year’s total of $9bn, according to Box Office Mojo figures. The holiday season is off to a good start, however, thanks to Disney’s Moana 2, Wicked and Paramount’s Gladiator II. Cinemas are also hoping for a strong showing from Paramount’s Sonic the Hedgehog sequel and Disney’s Mufasa: The Lion King, both out on Dec 20.
Fathom’s holiday offerings include A Drummer Boy Christmas Live, a concert film of the Christian duo For King and Country, the Christian-themed I am the Immaculate Conception and a re-release of the 70-year-old Bing Crosby classic White Christmas.
The company, which is rebranding itself as Fathom Entertainment next month, has also had success by re-releasing anime classics such as Studio Ghibli’s 2003 film Howl’s Moving Castle. Other popular re-releases included Coraline, a stop-motion animated film from 2009 based on a book by Neil Gaiman, which grossed $34mn this year.
Nutt said that with the decline in major studio output since the pandemic, combined with the rising options on streaming, audiences are looking for more experiences at cinemas, whether concerts or speciality programming.
The company began adopting a more traditional release strategy in 2023 with The Blind, a biopic of Phil Robertson of “Duck Dynasty,” a reality TV show based on a family business in Louisiana that sells gear to duck hunters. That film was released far more widely than the bespoke approach it had taken with previous films, and it followed that strategy with 11 films in 2024.
Despite its appeal to middle America, Fathom also caters to niche audiences with more highbrow tastes — including live transmissions of The Metropolitan Opera, which kick off next year with Aida on Jan 25.
