"Fireproof": It’s a Healthy Marriage of Faith and Filmmaking

By JULIE BLOOM
October 5, 2008
NYT

An almost all-volunteer cast and crew, including a star who was an ’80s teen heartthrob, and a plot about a firefighter who saves his marriage by turning to God — it hardly sounds like a recipe for box office success, let alone a best-selling book. But that’s what the film “Fireproof” has spawned.

The movie features Kirk Cameron, an alumnus of the television show “Growing Pains,” as the firefighter, and it cost just $500,000 to produce. Yet it opened two weekends ago with $6.5 million in ticket sales, good for No. 4 at the box office, just a few spots behind the No. 1 big-budget action thriller “Eagle Eye” and five spots ahead of Spike Lee’s World War II epic, “Miracle at St. Anna.” This past weekend “Fireproof” made $4.1 million more and so far has about $12.5 million total, according to estimates by Media by Numbers, a box office tracking company. the rest