By Alex Murashko
Movies with no homosexual content make about six times more money at the box office than movies with some, frequent or heavy homosexual content, according to a three-year study by Movieguide and the Christian Film & Television Commission.
The study is part of a detailed economic report to the entertainment industry recently released by Movieguide and the family advocacy group’s founder, Ted Baehr.
“We do an analysis of all [categories of] the box office and for many years, people would say that violence sells or sex sells and of course, we’ve found that not to be the case,” Baehr told WND.
Homosexual content in a movie may sell to the “the 2.5 or 3 percent who claim to be LGBT or homosexual or bisexual, but 98 percent of the moviegoers who don’t think about that, think about family and think about marriage.”
Baehr, as well as industry insiders, say it would be difficult to find anyone within Hollywood’s A-list willing to make a public comment on the study, but the commission’s hope is that filmmakers think about their pocketbooks before investing their efforts in homosexual content.
“If you want to make those kind of movies that’s fine, but are you trying to make it in the industry or not? The myth is that there is this big group out there that wants the stuff,” Baehr said. “What we say to Hollywood is that you can make these movies, but you are not going to make any money.”
He added that he doesn’t want to “bully anybody” regarding “gay” content in movies.
“We live in a free country, and I believe in free speech, and I believe that if we have more free speech that the good will triumph,” he said. “So I don’t believe in squelching free speech like some liberals do. Also, I’m not a traffic cop like Siskel and Ebert used to be by putting (assigning) a thumbs up or a thumbs down.”
The Movieguide study analyzed the content of 847 movies released from 2013 through 2015, according to the calendar year box office, “before the annual awards season hype can skew the box office numbers of certain movies, which happened with movies like Brokeback Mountain and Black Swan.”
Last year, movies with no homosexual content made more than $8.799 billion, while movies with some homosexual content made about $.998 billion, according to the study by Movieguide. Movies with strong or frequent homosexual references made about $.386 billion, and movies with heavy homosexual content earned a paltry $.084 billion, for a total of about $1.468 billion. The organization said similar findings occurred in 2014 and 2013.
David Greene, an independent film maker who is launching a Christian-based movie company, said the study results make sense.
“One of the leading reasons people go to movies is that for a short while they are able to live vicariously through the characters on the screen,” Greene said. “This is why we constantly reverberate ‘believable characters.’ A very small percentage of the population are LGBT, so most people do not have daily interaction with that sector of the population. So, it being prominent on the screen would be somewhat antithetic to the empathic nature of the viewer. I would venture to say that the margin would be much less for a younger, late teens and early 20’s crowd.”
Greene’s assumption about younger audiences may be true because most are probably not thinking “family” quite yet.
Baehr concludes:Â “The story here is that it’s better to sell four tickets to a family than one ticket to a person who is a very small minority and who is looking for some sort of affirmation. If you (filmmakers) want to make big money you need to not alienate the biggest audience out there. Not because you can’t do it, but because they are very sensitive to these things.”
