"Redeeming Love" Debuts in the Box Office Top-5

The movie taps into a large existing fan-base from Francine Rivers' best-selling book by the same name.

Abigail Cowen and Tom Lewis embrace in a scene from "Redeeming Love." Image: Universal Pictures.

The faith-based romance Redeeming Love claimed fourth place at the box office in its opening weekend, bringing in $3.53 million according to The Numbers website. That's a solid performance for the film, especially considering that it debuted in a relatively modest 1,900 theaters.

This movie is an adaptation of Francine Rivers' 1990s bestselling novel and is loosely inspired by the book of Hosea in the Old Testament of The Bible. The lead character - played by Abigail Cowen - is a woman named Angel who was sold into prostitution as a child. She is still engaged in that practice in Gold-rush era California when Michael Hosea, portrayed by Tom Lewis, falls in love with her despite her painful life circumstances.

The film earned an opening-night rating of a B+. Image: CinemaScore.

Redeeming Love covers particularly difficult subject matter and has been criticized by some Christian critics - here and here - for the graphic way in which it does so. It would seem that a sizeable number of the faith-based moviegoing audience has been put off by that as well, both from our own interactions with our readers and the movie's viewer rating from market research firm CinemaScore, which surveys opening-night attendees: they gave it just a B+; as a point of reference, the recently released Christian film American Underdog got an A+ CinemaScore rating when it debuted in theaters last month.