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Jason Barney: While this is the definition of a weekend that is going to be a very small footnote in film history, you can’t ignore the nice success that War Room has become. The last couple of weekends of August, up to Labor Day, are relegated for the films studios don’t have a lot of confidence in, something went wrong with the project, or there really was nowhere else on the release schedule, so we get the dumping ground effect. I don’t think that applies to War Room, and Tristar/Sony has pulled off a clean victory.

Regardless of how close the race ends up being with Straight Outta Compton (still another late summer success), the concept, numbers, and scale of War Room should be appreciated. While it might be within the mainstream to write off many of the faith based films, its notable studios are aware of the potential money involved and every so often test the earning power related to that viewing demographic.

Small project, small expectations, little risk...and they have a money maker on their hands. The budget for this one came in at around $3 million and the marketing costs can’t be too high. With this opening weekend they have basically paid for the film, paid for the effort to market it, and now just a few days into release they can sit back and watch the profit role in. Critics may not be giving it the best reviews, but the people who are seeing it are likely to tell their friends about it, so I think word-of-mouth will be good to average for a film like this.

Another interesting point is the small number of screens it opened on. Yes, it’s late August and the competition may be soft, but War Room achieved this with fewer than 1,200 screens. All of the other top 10 films had significantly more screens.

Kim Hollis: I never really know which of these faith-based films are going to take off. Every time I think we're on a streak and that it's going to be a genre that consistently makes money, you see one crash and burn. And then we go for a string of several poor performers before seeing a breakout. Quality sure doesn't seem to be the issue, because most of these films receive pretty terrible reviews.

With that said, War Room received an A+ Cinemascore, so the converted to whom it's preaching are definitely finding a lot to love. I don't necessarily think it will hold up well after this debut weekend, but it doesn't really have to. Everyone involved is probably pretty thrilled right about now.

David Mumpower: In addition to the exceptional discussion so far, I would add that War Room finishes a prior conversation. We wondered last year if there could be a form of box office saturation for the faith-based cinema. That's exactly what transpired as the sheer volume of releases in a short period of time taxed the target demographic. Going to see every release started to feel like work. Then, there was a six month gap prior to the release of War Room where no serious releases debuted. Now that there's been some breathing room, that core audience is right back in the theater loyally supporting another film. As an aside, I also think the Tyler Perry analogy is brilliant.

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