Or perhaps it was just a crappy movie that people didn't want to pay to see?

Particularly when the buried punch-line was that Christian believers should pay their hard-earned money to be insulted about their deeply-held religious beliefs.

Actor blames Catholic Church for lack of Golden Compass sequels.

Actor Sam Elliot has blamed the Catholic Church for stopping sequels from being made to the Golden Compass movie based on the first book of Philip Pullman’s atheistic trilogy His Dark Materials. The film, starring Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig and Eva Green, grossed more than $380 million worldwide after its Christmas 2007 release, but took in only $85 million in the U.S. According to the Internet Movie Database, the film had a budget of $180 million.


The 65-year-old Elliot, who played a Texan “aeronaut” in the film, charged that a Catholic-led campaign against the movie stopped its sequels from being made.

“The Catholic Church happened to The Golden Compass, as far as I'm concerned,” Elliot remarked to the Evening Standard.

He said the movie did “incredible” at the box office but the Catholic Church “lambasted” the filmmakers and “scared off” New Line Cinema executives.

The movie itself is about a young heroine named Lyra who fights against an evil organization called the Magisterium, which many people see as a reference to the Catholic Church's body of teachings of the same name. The anti-religious message was reportedly toned down compared to the book.

Sorry to see that the actor was Sam Elliott, whose characterization of taciturn westerners I've always liked, but this is a real dive into crackpottery, since everyone knows that if the Catholic Church had opposed the movie that would have been "box office gold."

In fact, the real scandal was that "[t]he U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Office for Film & Broadcasting had initially published a positive review of the movie, which was later pulled."

The atheist, anti-Catholic author Phillip Pullman chimes in:

"Pullman, the author of the book on which the Golden Compass was based, said that the likelihood of the film trilogy being completed is decreasing.


He said that Catholics’ efforts against the film “must have played a part” in the trilogy being shelved, the Telegraph reports.

Pullman has denied his series is anti-Catholic, claiming it is a warning about what religion can do “when it gets its hands on the levers of power.”

All uses of terms like "magisterium" and "pope" and the deployment of Catholic imagery in the book and film being pure coincidence.
The Vatican...is there nothing it can't do?