Theatrical is back? - Could Faith-based film have its blockbuster moment?

By Kunle Falodun, Co-founder, House of Faith

This summer has been quite a year for cinema. Spider-Man: Brand New Day delivered the biggest domestic opening weekend in box office history. The Odyssey has become the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time, overtaking Deadpool & Wolverine. Toy Story 5, Michael, and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie have all crossed the billion-dollar mark. After years of conversations about the decline of cinema, 2026 is shaping up to be the biggest year for theatrical since before the pandemic.

Watching Brand New Day break records made me miss my Sony Pictures days. I know how immensely proud everyone at the studio must feel right now and I also know what it takes to get a film like that in front of an audience: the years of planning, the risk, the marketing, the distribution and the sheer scale of ambition required to make something the whole world stops to watch. I am genuinely happy for them.

Brand New Day broke records in Nigeria too, taking over N700 million between previews and opening weekend, and crossing a billion naira in cinemas within nine days, the fastest any film has ever done that in this market. No Nigerian film, faith-based or otherwise, has moved at that velocity. The key lesson for us here is that people have not stopped going to the cinema; they have simply become more selective about what is worth leaving the house for.

And that is a lesson I think everyone involved in faith-based entertainment should pay attention to. Therefore, in Nigeria in particular, October matters more than people may realize. Agbara Nla: The Return, the remake of Evangelist Mike Bamiloye's 1993 classic, arrives in Nigerian cinemas nationwide on October 1st. It is Mount Zion, one of the founding names in African gospel filmmaking, stepping into the formal theatrical box office in a significant way.

How this film performs will probably tell us more about the appetite for faith-based cinema in Africa than any Hollywood comparison can. I will be watching it closely, and I think everyone in this industry should too.

At House of Faith, we have been having real conversations about what a theatrical presence could look like for us. We are still reviewing our strategy, and I certainly don't think the answer is simply to borrow the Hollywood playbook, drop it into Lagos, Nairobi, or Johannesburg, and expect it to work the same way.

Africa's audiences are different. Our economics are different. Our cinema infrastructure is different. Even the way we discover and consume content is different. But the appetite for gathering, for shared experience, for being part of something bigger than ourselves, travels everywhere. In fact, the Church understood the power of gathering two thousand years before Hollywood built its first multiplex.

So, what can faith-based entertainment learn from what is happening in theatrical right now?

First, scale and ambition matter.

For too long, particularly in Africa, we have sometimes allowed "faith-based" to become an excuse for small thinking. Small budgets may sometimes be unavoidable, but small ambition is not. Audiences have become sophisticated. They watch the best content from around the world every day. If we want them to pay for a ticket, leave their homes and sit in a cinema for two hours or so, we have to give them something worthy of that commitment. That doesn't necessarily mean spending $200 million. It means being ambitious about the story, the writing, the performances, production quality, marketing, and ultimately the experience we are giving the audience – everything we have all spoken about before

Secondly, a theatrical release has to feel like an event.

That is perhaps one of the biggest lessons from the films succeeding today. People will still gather when you give them a reason to gather. This is particularly interesting for faith-based entertainment because we already understand community. Churches gather millions of people every week across Africa. We have communities, trusted leaders, youth groups, campuses, conferences, conventions, and networks that cut across countries and denominations.

Hollywood spends enormous amounts of money trying to build communities around its films. The Church already has community. The question is whether we can respectfully and intelligently connect that existing community with great storytelling.

Thirdly, we need to think differently about distribution.

The African solution may not look exactly like the American solution.

Cinema screens remain limited in many African markets, and ticket prices and geography have a real impact. So perhaps the opportunity is bigger than simply getting a film onto cinema screens. These are many questions worth asking, and there is evidence elsewhere that faith-based audiences will turn up.

The Chosen built a theatrical business out of a television series, crossing $140 million in cumulative box office since 2021. The King of Kings opened to $19.1 million and helped Jesus-centered films hold three of the top ten box-office positions in America for the first time. War Room, made for roughly $3 million, returned nearly $68 million.

None of these are Spider-Man numbers, but that isn't really the point; the point is that an audience exists. The bigger question for those of us building faith-based entertainment in Africa is what we do with that knowledge.

I believe there is an opportunity to create a genuine blockbuster faith-based African movie. Not simply a Christian film that Christians support because they feel they should, but a great film that people genuinely want to see, something entertaining, culturally relevant, excellently made, and uncompromising in its values.

Perhaps the opportunity is not simply to make Africa's first truly blockbuster faith-based movie. Perhaps it is to build a new model around it, one that combines world-class storytelling with the extraordinary community infrastructure that already exists across the Church.

Hollywood has reminded us this summer that audiences will still leave home when you give them something worth gathering for. The question for faith-based filmmakers is whether we are prepared to create something big enough, good enough, and culturally relevant enough to make them come.

At House of Faith, that is a question we are taking very seriously.