Hollywood just got a whole lot more meaningful for the world's Christian Tuesday as 20th Century Fox announced the launch of its latest division, FoxFaith, that aims to put out no less than 12 religious-oriented films each year.

|PIC1|The new division, part of the home entertainment division of Rupert Murdoch's movie studio, will overturn decades of spiritual drought in Hollywood and represents the boldest move so far by any of the Hollywood studios into the generally uncharted territory of the evangelical and traditional Christian market.

According to Steve Feldstein, a spokesman for 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, the new FoxFaith banner will acquire Christian-themed films produced outside the studio and release them on DVD with the help of a marketing network that spans 90,000 churches and 14 million households nationwide, the Washington Post reports.

"We are excited to be having a place where people can go to see quality family films," Laura Neutzling, vice-president of marketing for World Distribution, the distributors for Fox, told The Guardian. "There hasn't been a great one-stop place for Christians to buy great family films that they can trust won't be offensive."

The first fruit of the new brand will be Love's Abiding Joy, a western based on a series by best-selling Christian novelist Janette Oke, and the label will be targeting at the same churchgoing audience that made Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ such a global box office smash.

The movie, directed and co-written by Michael Landon Jr, son of the late star of TV hit "Little House on the Prairie", tells the story of the experience of American pioneers and the hardships that challenged their faith. It is due for limited release in 250 theatres over two weeks in the US, starting 6 October.

Despite the small-scale release (a typical big-studio release would run across 1,500 to 3,000 theatres), Fox is sure it is tapping into an underserved and potentially lucrative corner of the film-loving public who remain unimpressed by the often spiritually void Hollywood offerings that glorify sex, violence and generally immoral behaviour.

"We saw an opportunity to fill a need in an underserved market," Feldstein said.

Other releases from FoxFaith will be adaptations of Christian books and go straight to DVD for sale in Christian bookshops and speciality retailers.

According to Feldstein, the number one drive behind creating FoxFaith was the unprecedented commercial success of Gibson's Passion in 2004 which grossed a massive US$612 million worldwide.

That success was the result in part of a marketing campaign that thrust the film into the eye of evangelical Christians around the world.

"The groundswell that happened with a film like the Passion was really illuminating to Hollywood, that there were people willing to come out to the theatre who had previously eschewed Hollywood films because of the violence and questionable material," Ms Neutzling said.

With its new faith division, Fox is making sure that this time round, it isn't going to miss out.

"I don't know where their hearts are, but we have to be realistic. They have found an audience out there where Hollywood can make a lot of money and they are tapping into that," Ms Neutzling said.