Let me start with a question: I do not know if the following piece from The Atlantic is a news report, an opinion essay or a movie review.

It addresses a topic that is certainly worthy of a news report -- the box-office flop (so far, I guess) of the latest version of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Lurking behind this movie is a larger topic, which is Hollywood's ongoing attempt to tap into the "Christian audience" that turned out for Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ in 2004.

Studio executives have been chasing Gibson's Passion demographic for a decade and major newsrooms have been covering those efforts over and over and over. Like I said, this is a topic worthy of serious reporting.

Here's the crucial question: Is this "Christian" niche a $50 million or so marketplace for low-budget movies or a place where Hollywood players can find the magic formula that produces big box-office bucks for major releases that cost $100 or so? So that's what is going on in this Atlantic piece, that ran with this headline:

Ben-Hur Was Hollywood’s Epic $100M Mistake

The film flopped hard at the box office after studios tried to copy the success of 2004's The Passion of the Christ.

The following summary material is long, but you need to read it to understand my main point in this post.

The fifth film adaptation of Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ was a $100 million co-production between Paramount Pictures and MGM. It starred the relatively unknown British actor Jack Huston in the title role, was directed by the mid-tier action maestro Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter), and drew largely negative reviews. Many critics noted the film’s supreme inferiority to William Wyler’s 1959 version of the tale, which won 11 Oscars and is widely viewed as one of the greatest classic Hollywood epics. Just the idea of remaking Wyler’s film feels like a colossal error in an age of tiresome franchise reboots -- but when you consider how studios tried to belatedly capitalize on religious audiences to save the movie, the existence of Ben-Hur seems all the more cynical.