(INDIEWIRE) — Faith-based filmmaking isn’t dead. While the genre has struggled recently to turn out crossover hits (and nothing has topped the $611M take of Mel Gibson’s controversial smash hit “The Passion of the Christ,” still the top earner in the genre 14 years after its release), brothers Andrew and Jon Erwin’s latest film, “I Can Only Imagine,” surprised this weekend’s box office with a $17 million opening take, good enough to push it to third place in a crowded field. Among contemporary Christian community titles, only “Heaven Is for Real” had a better opening, scoring $22 million when it opened in 2014.
Other faith-based movies have recently faltered at the box office, making the success of “I Can Only Imagine” as a bit of an outlier in a struggling — and often independently made — genre.
