Disney wants its CS Lewis movie to be the next ‘Lord of the Rings’ – which is why it is eagerly courting the Christian lobby. John Hiscock reports.
It is not something that will cause any tremors outside Hollywood, but in the world of film marketing it is a turnaround of epic proportions.
After carefully avoiding religion for most of its history, the Walt Disney Co, in a sharp deviation from corporate policy, has reached out to Christian evangelical groups to help shape a marketing campaign for its big Christmas film, The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
The entertainment giant has hired several Christian marketing groups to handle the film, including Motive Marketing, which ran the campaign for Mel Gibson’s wildly successful The Passion of the Christ.
The move is particularly remarkable because for the past decade Disney has been the subject of a religious boycott imposed by Christian organisations, who accused the company of betraying its family-values legacy by providing employee health benefits to same-sex partners, allowing gay days at its theme parks and producing what they considered to be controversial films, books and television programmes through Disney subsidiaries.
Now the wooing of evangelicals, combined with the departure of Disney chief executive Michael Eisner – described by some religious leaders as “anti-Christian” – signals the implicit end of the boycott and the beginning of a possible money-spinning franchise for the studio, which is desperately seeking a blockbuster hit that can deliver sequels, along the lines of the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings films.
