Next Year's Answer to "Soul Surfer" Greenlit at Sony

via Deadline...

When I had my wisdom teeth out, the combination of lingering anasthesea and (I think) Vicodin had me swearing to my parents that there was a Unicorn walking on the ceiling, along with several varieties of dinosaur. Fortunately for the world at large, neither of my parents were part of a profession built around selling reassurances to worshippers of either horned equines or thunder-lizards - so nobody wrote a book or made a movie out of my delusions...

4 year-old Colton Burpo, on the other hand, came back from near-death during an emergency apendectomy claiming to have hung out in Heaven with cheerful winged angels (you know, the type that aren't actually anywhere in the Bible), and The Big J.C. Himself; and has a dad who is an Evangelical minister by trade "calling." So... you can probably guess the rest.


Colton's father, Todd, collaborated with Lynn Vincent (who also - shocker! - "worked with" Sarah Palin on "Going Rouge") on the book, "Heaven is For Real," which became a New York Times bestseller last year. Just so we're clear: We're talking about MILLIONS of people paying good money to read a second hand account of a toddler's near-death experience as-told by his minister dad and a political "journalist" best (only?) known for shaping one of the most widely-disparaged cash-in autobiographies in recent memory.

And now it's going to be a movie, and the "big news" is that a legitimate studio is stepping in as opposed to one of the smaller religious propaganda "entertainment" outfits: Instead it's being set up at Sony, courtesy of an alliance between Texas MegaVangelist Bishop T.D. Jakes and Sony exec DeVon Franklin, who made a lot of ink recently with his autobiography detailing his "double life" as a bigshot Hollywood player AND an ordained minister and offering advice on how to succeed in both (looking at his filmography, step one is apparently "make a lot of movies with Will Smith," which I don't think one really needs divine guidance to figure out...)

Question: Am I the ONLY person who has noticed that, despite all this constant talk about "The Passion" having opened up the market for explicitly Christian films, the ONLY one since that's made any real money or had any crossover success has been the Narnia movies - i.e. the franchise where Christ/Christianity is NEVER mentioned by name and is instead couched in an explicitly-"paganized" allegory? Shouldn't there be a lesson in that?