The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

If the fact that most Christmas movies dance around or outright ignore the religious aspects of the holiday, perhaps you’ll appreciate The Best Christmas Pageant Ever for going against the grain. This feature adaptation of Barbara Robinson’s 1972 novel of the same name is as churchy and overtly Christian as any mainstream film I’ve encountered for some time. It hails from director Dallas Jenkins, who created “The Chosen”, the crowdfunded, free-to-watch Biblical drama that has enjoyed lucrative theatrical release and whose fifth season was promoted and teased at the start of my public-accessible advance screening.

Pageant appears vaguely to be set in the early 1970s in a middle American town where the Herdmans, six rarely supervised young siblings, are infamous for their trouble-making ways. These rowdy misfits cuss, shoplift, smoke cigars, bully their peers, and terrorize teachers. Imagine Scut Farkus from A Christmas Story times six. The chaotic evil tornado that is this family ends up swirling straight into the Emmanuel Church’s 75th annual Christmas pageant. The task of directing the pageant, a hallowed, conservative, respectful tradition in this churchgoing town, falls on protagonist family matriarch Grace Bradley (Judy Greer) when its longtime director falls ill.

The sanctity of the play retelling the story of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem is threatened when eldest Herdman daughter Imogene (Beatrice Schneider) emerges as the only volunteer to play Mary. Imogene’s siblings claim other pivotal roles, prompting nervous children and judgmental adults alike to fear that Emmanuel’s 75th annual pageant will be an all-time low.

Our point of access is Beth (Molly Belle Wright), the good-hearted daughter of Grace, who narrates from adulthood (as Lauren Graham), so you know that at least she will survive this holiday catastrophe-in-the-making.

Entering this film as blindly as I proved to be a somewhat eye-opening experience. I have long been aware of faith-based filmmaking, a conservative Christian counterculture to Hollywood’s secular output that has on occasion produced jaw-dropping box office returns on modest investments. The Wikipedia entry for Sony Pictures subsidiary Affirm Films lets the impressive numbers of that studio’s twenty films, many of them produced/directed/written by Alex Kendrick and his brother Stephen, speak for themselves.

Unbeknownst to me coming in, Pageant hails from Kingdom Story Company, a younger Nashville/L.A.-based studio owned by Lionsgate that seems to be employing playbook similar to Affirm’s. This fruitful collaboration began with 2018’s box office sensation I Can Only Imagine and included last year’s highly profitable Jesus Revolution. Kingdom’s 2024 efforts have not been as splashy as those, but the dramas Ordinary Angels and Unsung Hero have turned profits on modest budgets. Kingdom did not fare as well on the higher-budgeted, long-delayed Wonder spin-off White Bird, which recently contributed to the ongoing, historic rough patch Lionsgate has experienced in 2024.

It seems unlikely that Pageant is the film to turn things around for Lionsgate. The post-COVID marketplace has been difficult to wrap your head around. The most highly anticipated film of the year, Joker: Folie à Deux, is wrapping up its brief theatrical run with a domestic gross south of $60 million. The latest collaboration of director Robert Zemeckis and his Forrest Gump/Cast Away leading man Tom Hanks, Here, just opened in fourth place with a lowly $5 million first-weekend draw. Two Disney summer sequels, Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine, have collectively earned around $3 billion worldwide this year. Everything else has settled for far less, as studios and exhibitors experiment with shorter release windows and quicker streaming premieres, as they compete with Netflix and other deep-pocketed streaming services.

It may strike you as weird to ruminate at length on the business side of show business in a review of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. The niche faith film market somewhat exists in a bubble, appealing to people who are much more likely to identify as churchgoers than as moviegoers. Budgets and box office numbers are two of the only measures with which we can compare these Christian productions to their secular counterparts on even ground. A movie like Pageant will win no major awards. It won’t draw rave reviews in the press or inspire passionate debate in online cineaste spheres. But it will appear in the box office reports alongside A24’s Heretic and modest mainstream holdovers.

Pageant is a bit difficult to judge critically because it seems more committed to using its story to spread a message than to elevate the craft. The acting is largely subpar, which in a production full of novice child actors is not all that surprising or upsetting. Greer, predictably, is the exception, having more than a quarter-century of experience in mainstream television and film prior to this. Her fine performance does as much as anything to hold this together and keep it from feeling like four episodes of a short-lived, unpolished TV show. The questionable creative choices may pile up, down to some cringy closing text screens, but at the foundation there is an agreeable message of seeing the good in one another, even those whom society has cast aside. If that strikes a chord for you, then the makers of this film ought to have feel they did this story justice.