In a development anyone could have seen coming from a mile away, a certain subgenre of film has risen to the top of the streaming conversation this weekend, and it’s even less surprising to discover that it’s Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ leading the charge.
While watching a man flagellated and then essentially murdered in agonizingly graphic detail isn’t quite what you’d call typical tie-in media, Easter has urged audiences all over the world to brave the wince-inducing epic that set the box office alight. Per FlixPatrol, Gibson’s unlikely blockbuster is one of the Top 10 most-watched features in the United States on both Prime Video and iTunes, even if it’s hardly fun for the whole family to gather around.
Like most of Gibson’s efforts behind the camera, The Passion of the Christ came under fire for its harrowing, unrelenting, and repeated onscreen violence, which did absolutely nothing to dissuade people from watching it on the biggest screen possible. Independently financed and budgeted at a modest $30 million the film Jim Caviezel admitted severely hampered his career hauled in a mind-boggling $610 million at the box office.
It ended up as the highest-grossing overseas release of 2004, the fifth top-earner of the year on a global scale, the biggest Christian movie of all-time, the most commercially successful indie flick ever made, and the biggest R-rated smash hit on domestic shores, while it still ranks as one of the most lucrative adult-skewing theatrical releases in the history of cinema.
That’s not a bad return, even if the end product is precision-engineered to one target demographic above all.