Mel Gibson Film '5th Largest Opening in History'

In the face of a vicious and sustained campaign attacking both Mel Gibson and his film "The Passion of the Christ" the opening day box office receipts Wednesday soared to $23.5 million with an additional $3 million take in advance screenings held Monday and Tuesday.

According to the New York Times which has been in an attack mode against Gibson and his film since he first began filming the Passion, it was the fifth largest opening in Hollywood history with "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King," hanging on to first place with opening day receipts of $34.4 million.

Industry experts told the Times that the box-office figure was astonishing for an extremely violent, R-rated, religious film in Aramaic and Latin with English subtitles.

"This number would be impressive for a mainstream blockbuster, let alone a subtitled historical-religious epic," Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations, which tracks ticket sales told the Times. "This shows the power of public discourse with regard to religious topics and the effect a full-blown media blitz can have on the public."

Bob Berney, president of Newmarket Films, which is distributing the picture, told the Times he expected the number of theaters to increase slightly next week because of the intense interest. The film is already moving to more screens on Friday, for a total of 4,793 in 3,043 theaters.

"The success of the film so far is incredible, and it's across the board," Berney told the Times adding that theaters were packed not just in Bible Belt cities like Houston and Oklahoma City, but also at the AMC theater on 42nd Street in Manhattan and the soaring ArcLight Cinemas in Hollywood. The Times reported that some producers and studio executives said the film would probably take in $75 million by the close of the weekend and, if attendance continued to hold up, could take in as much as $100 million in the first five days.

"My feeling is these people will go back more than once," Mr. Berney said. "And with this kind of number, people who are not part of churches will go just out of feeling that they've got to see it, a curiosity. I don't know how long it will go," he added "but there will be enough repeat business to sustain it for quite a while."

To everybody who responded to my post--Imal, rwfromkansas, cboldt, ronzo, right way right, here are some thoughts/questions. I have had these dialogues before and they don't shake belief, because belief is carried by the emotional brain/limbic system (see the work of Joseph Ledoux and others), imho, so it is not rational and not easily affected by reasoning unless a person is willing to suspend belief and disbelief and ask themselves hard questions, so...

1) If that scripture quoted me is from God, then why did men write it? Has anyone gone and read Bart Ehrman? Do you know how many sects were fighting for supremacy? These are stories told by men, and even if you believe these stories came from a true source, you well know that we all have selective perception (see research on perception, Stephen Kosslyn, at Harvard; and on memory's malleability, best research is Elizabeth Loftus, original research on eyewitness testimony and then hundreds of studies showing how malleable and inaccurate memory is) and so at best these are rough and inaccurate interpretations by men (women don't seem to get the chance to write much scripture)....so don't take them as "Gospel" truth...

2) Christianity is not the most popular religion in the world. There are more buddhists and Muslims than there are Christians. Now, if God is real, this Christian God, then why would "He" exclusively preach to only a portion of human beings? What are these other religions doing? And don't you know very well that followers of those other religions believe their Gospel as you do yours? Does this not make you wonder just which Gospel is true? It just doesn't make sense that an omnisicient omnipotent GOd, even if "He" gave only humans free will (I guess not animals? Well, soem people who love their pets get a bit confused about that, and wonder about their dogs having souls...etc), why so many of them would abandon true Gospel and spend all that time getting enlightened by other false Gospels?

Do you, for instance, not appreciate the Dalai Lama--a very joyful being?

3) If you take a good look at science, a personal God who made humans the center of the universe and of his purposes makes no sense. Just as we once thought the sun moved around the earth, and that God himself made all creatures great and small, we now know the earth moves around the sun, and that evolution is responsible for all creatures great and small. You need only look at the span of life on earth, and the long lived dinosaurs, (and the fact there have been five mass extinctions) to understand that humans are a brief flowering on this planet, and a tiny blip in the greater enormous expanse of the universe. If you do believe in a purposeful universe, you would be hard pressed to think God just made all those galaxies and stars for nothing, that his only purpose is to see us humans redeemed. And why for goodness sake allow the proliferation of all kinds of life that has no meaning for redemption? Such as tubeworms at the bottom of the sea vents...what is their purpose, since except for a few scientists we never even get to see them? WHy did God make so many beetles--more species of beetles, I can't remember the #, than you could imagine (one naturalist said, one thing you can say about God is, he likes beetles).

4) There is just no way to reconcile the suffering in the world with a God providing free will. I have for instance posed the following to my former "good CHristian" boss who made the Jewish slurs...in Calcutta, sometimes good mothers have to maim their children so as to get enough $ from begging to feed those children. Now, a newborn babe is innocent, right? So did that infant choose to be born to a woman in Calcutta and be maimed? Before it barely has a conscious thought? The idea of free will begins to break down when you realize that there are huge social and economic forces that constrain people, as well as disease, pestilence etc--from much of any freedom in their own lives.

5) Thus I am more respectful of altruists like Paul Farmer who really try to help those suffering people than those who sit in blessed wealthy America and quote scripture and say that God actually intervened to make a popular excellent actor make a film about Jesus, to bring more people to "The word". I am more impressed with right action than hoots of triumph about a movie. Apparently its a pretty good movie, even in spite of some bad reviews, and in fact, though I never saw Braveheart, I hear that was also. So Mel Gibson is a good actor and director. And he certainly has the artistic right to spend his own $ and make a movie after his own beliefs, and from the postings I've seen, it is not rabidly anti-semitic, so I'm okay with it, and I find it interesting that it has exhumed out of the cultural subconscious all these fears, desires, hopes and angers. It is not so much about the movie as about us

6) My own personal beliefs are in some kind of "divine" agency that I do not understand but is nonspecific. If Jesus was an inspiring rabbi, then that's fine. If he was some kind of avatar, then others are also avatars--Buddha, even the Dalai Lama. One religion doesn't get all the goodies. It just doesn't make rational sense. Anyway, my personal belief is that there's more out there than our little human brains will understand. We don't know how matter and energy even got here, and what kind of life forms are out there in those distant galaxies. I suspect we are not the only intelligent life. People should be allowed their beliefs, but I find the beliefs about God provincial, and they exclude much of the world and the way the universe really operates. Which doesn' tmean that Christianity doesn't have some nice concepts, it surely does, forgiveness being the most important one.

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