'Unsung Hero' Gets Praise and Performs Heroically in the Faith-Based Market

What, you didn't know about the origin story of these Christian artists, For King+Country and Rebecca St. James? Me either! Nor did I realize how inspiring it was, until this movie started making the rounds.

Sidenote: Here are the Spotify for Rebecca St. James & For King + Country, if you're not aware of them.

Back to the film:
This film is one of the standard subgenres in faith-based film, the Christian musical & music artist biopic, and therefore we have much to compare this film to, quality-wise, and in the box office. But more than it's popularity, so far, what we are seeing is an openness to review it well at a few mainstream news outlets. Surprising? Yes, absolutely.

In this Variety article they even drop the name Spielberg, not in the relative sense of it's filmmaking but in the type of story Unsung Hero is, comparing it to The Fabelmans in that strict sense. Albeit an indirect compliment, this is still pretty significant.

The film came out last Friday and here's the final trailer.

I personally have yet to see it, but many reviews have impressed me and, (cough) I actually enjoyed a smattering of Rebecca St. James back in the day. She was quite good, but this was in the early 90's. Having not known her story, and hearing the press junkets and interviews for this film (now, in the last few months), I was a bit surprised. How could I have not known all this Aussie family went through to get her into this position to make a difference with her music? I was intrigued.

So, here we have it! Her brothers also ended up making the band, For King+Country a few years back and now they are telling their family story of riches to rags to riches, if that's how you'd say it. There are so many great reviews of this film, and it also has a 99% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes (even though not all reviewers love it, since it gets a 64% from reviewers). Still that's not so bad, considering.

So, my guess is if you took a gander to see this film, you would not be disappointed.

It has also been holding onto a #4 position at the box office, but you should know that this is less important than how it has been doing within the faith-based marketplace. You have to judge a film apples to apples. So, this means you compare it to similar films by genre and subgenre.

I like to compare at least 2 other very similar and recent films to the box office of the film I am analyzing. I used Journey to Bethlehem (the most recent musical faith-based film), and The Blind (a recent family biopic-style film) to accomplish this, and so we have some encouraging results here.

Unsung is still only four days in, so their red line going straight up is still small, but the upward trajectory means it will likely make more money that both of these other films. As I highlighted The Blind on the two week mark (Day 14) below, you can see that it made $11.6 million by this time, but I will bet you that Unsung will end up doing from $14-17 million by that time. Give it 50-60 days and it will start leveling out but will do very well.

So, we have a peppy velocity here compared to both of these other films, even though all of them are well made films. It didn't do as well as something like Jesus Revolution, or Sound of Freedom, but these other films really aren't from similar subgenre, besides the period-piece aspect of Jesus Revolution, but this is really not enough to draw such a close comparison. They're still very different films.

Potentially the popularity of both of these bands (Rebecca St. James, and For King + Country) has served them well in gaining interest for the film, but also they have definitely done the rounds in media. Just check out some of these reviews above first if you are thinking about watching it!

Did you enjoy this article? Have you ever listened to the bands from the film yourself (St. James or King+Country)? And what do you think of their film or their story? Let us know down below (with subscription) or on our social media!