First Audiences React to "Passion"

A T L A N T A, Feb. 24 -- It takes something extraordinary to fill an Atlanta movie theater to capacity on a rainy, chilly week night in February. It takes an Event. A Blockbuster. A Hollywood Mega-Hit.

Few in the movie industry believed that a movie in which actors speak only in Aramaic, Latin and Greek, a movie focusing almost solely on the 12 most difficult hours of Christ's life on Earth — and in excruciating detail at that — could approach the break-even point, let alone "hit" status.

But it is. At Atlanta's Magic Johnson Multiplex 12-screen theater Monday, nearly 3,000 people poured in to see The Passion of the Christ. And they not only showed up to see it, they watched it with a hushed intensity uncharacteristic for most movie audiences. Then they poured from the theater, many weeping, some sobbing, and most singing its praises.

And that included a group of teenage boys who looked more likely to attend a Matrix movie than a film about Jesus.

"It's powerful," one piped up. Asked if the intensity of the movie — the unsparing depiction of the brutality leveled against Christ — was hard to take, he answered, "Like they say, it's the Passion. It touches your heart."

Nearby, an elderly woman wept for several minutes, overwhelmed by the experience. As her family surrounded her, she clasped her hands together, whispering aloud, "Thank you, Jesus, thank you, Jesus."

Fervor Sweeps the Nation

This kind of reaction is not isolated to Atlanta audiences. In Miami, Kansas City, Little Rock, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Shreveport, La., theaters are selling out tickets for the movie. Many have shifted the number of screens allotted to other movies to make more room for The Passion.

And advance ticket sales are through the roof, according to Art Levitt, president of Fandango, the nation's largest online and phone movie ticketing service.