Passion of the Christ Caused Crime?

Interesting sentence I just found in Dahl and DellaVigna's fascinating paper "Does Movie Violence Increase Violent Crime?"

"Figure 1d also plots the top-10 weekend for the audience of strongly violent and mildly violent movies. Interestingly, not only dose the figure offers no indication of a positive relationship between violent movies and crime, but it offers some indication of a negative relationship. For
both mildly violent and strongly violent movies, 7 out of the top 10 weekends have below average (that is, negative) residuals for log(assaults). It is interesting to note that one of the positive residuals for the strongly violent movies is for the movie ”Passion of the Christ.”

Interestingly, at the time, I do remember hearing reports of hate crimes, but I dismissed them. I wonder if someone shouldn't look into this more closely, though. Maybe with an event study? I'm not sure if they follow up on this in the paper or not, as this is really just one of the early raw correlations. But that's a provocative little finding, to say the least, even for an early stage correlation. (Full disclosure, I loved that movie).