OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
“Full House” and “Fuller House” alum and actress Candace Cameron Bure as well as a growing number of actors and producers are moving towards making more films that feature patriotic and faith-based themes.
Fox News reported that Bure, 47, who spent more than 10 years at the Hallmark Channel making renowned holiday films and earned the moniker the “Queen of Christmas,” recently left that network for a new traditional-family-oriented outlet called Great American Family.
“My heart wants to tell stories that have more meaning and purpose and depth behind them,” Bure, who is now the network’s chief creative officer, said in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal.
“I knew that the people behind Great American Family were Christians that love the Lord and wanted to promote faith programming and good family entertainment,” Bure, who is devout about her beliefs, added.
After the WSJ asked whether any content she oversaw would contain any LGTBQ themes, she responded in the negative.
“I think that Great American Family will keep traditional marriage at the core,” she said.
Fox News Digital added:
Great American Family, which was launched in 2021, provides a faith and family alternative to purely secular programming, including the massive holiday film market.
While major studios and networks have typically steered away from focusing on the religious aspects of the Christmas holiday, Great American Family is taking the opposite track and highlighting Christianity in many of its holiday offerings, according to Abbott.
Also, Pure Flix founders David A.R. White and Michael Scott, who started the network in 2005 and which has since been acquired by Sony Pictures, told Fox News that the holiday genre of more traditional films is actually wide open and hugely popular.
“I think families were looking for it,” Scott, who is the son of a pastor like White, told Fox News. “People not only here in the U.S. but around the world were looking for it. It was just a great place for us to be.”
“Ultimately, we figured out that, I think the stat was something like 150 million people went to church once a month,” White said. “And yet there was this hole for positive, uplifting, faith-based entertainment in the marketplace. And so we just really felt like we needed to fill that.”
He noted further that the pair were inspired by “this hunger and this need to give people content that uplifted and inspired that human spirit that was something different than what Hollywood was giving to them.”
“I don’t even think Hollywood really realized how big of a marketplace is here, like it didn’t even exist,” White added.
“I think for the longest time this content wasn’t available to families,” White said. “Just safe, uplifting, inspiring content that ultimately brings people to higher levels of insight to who God is and the purpose that he has for their lives.”
He said some attitudes in Hollywood changed when a 2014 drama produced by Pure Flix called “God’s Not Dead” eventually grossed $62 million in ticket sales on a budget of just $2 million.
“It rocked Hollywood, that all of a sudden, faith-based films, there was a purpose, there was a hunger for them,” he said. “Now we see almost every studio has a faith-based label. They woke up to that, like. ‘Oh, wow. There’s a whole genre here that we’ve been missing for so many years.'”
“And that’s where Pure Flix differs,” he added. “We’re not really just focused on Santa Claus or how many gifts someone is going to have. It’s really about the reason for the season. Where is God in the middle of this Christmas?”
Other stars are looking at filling niches that Hollywood tends to avoid these days, like films with patriotic themes. On that front, “Dukes of Hazzard” and country music star John Schneider has just produced and starred in just such a film after realizing that few people in Hollywood were interested in such pictures.
Fox News reported:
Schneider, 62, is starring in the new patriotic film titled “To Die For,” which was directed and produced independently without major studio backing.
The film follows reclusive veteran Quint North (Schneider), who takes a public stand for his personal freedoms after receiving a court order to keep his American flag-flying El Camino truck away from a local high school. The actor told Fox News Digital the film defends patriotism, freedom of speech and the American flag.
Schneider told Fox News Digital that he was inspired to make “To Die For” after reading an article about a man who had been jailed for refusing to remove the American flag from the back of his truck.
“I read the article, and it said he had a restraining order against him, so he couldn’t drive within a certain distance from the [local] high school with the flag on his truck,” he recounted.
“[My wife and I] are big supporters of our military and our law enforcement. And I thought, now is the time to make a movie about this guy,” he told the outlet. “I wanted to make a movie not about that individual guy, but that kind of guy who is willing to go to jail in order to continue to express his First Amendment right of free speech.”
