Heaven Is for Real (film)
2014 film by Randall Wallace
Heaven Is for Real is a 2014 American Christian drama film written and directed by Randall Wallace and co-written by Christopher Parker, based on the 2010 book Heaven Is for Real by Pastor Todd Burpo and Lynn Vincent. The film stars Greg Kinnear, Kelly Reilly, Connor Corum, Margo Martindale, and Thomas Haden Church. The film has received mixed critical reviews, but it nevertheless was a box office success, grossing $101 million against a $12 million budget, becoming the second-highest grossing Christian film of all time.
Plot
Living in rural Imperial, Nebraska, Todd Burpo is the pastor of Crossroads Wesleyan Church, who works on garage doors on the side as well as coaching wrestling at the local high school. He goes home to find his 4-year-old son, Colton, on the steps, trying to avoid his mom Sonja's weekly church choir group practice inside. They go together for pizza, first passing by a hospital to visit a dying man.
Todd has a few health setbacks, which keep him from his congregation for weeks. The first is a bad broken leg during a baseball match; the second is kidney stones. His family does a road trip to Denver, and on the way back Colton and his sister Cassie start vomiting and he has a fever, but the doctor assumes it is the flu as it has been going around.
As both parents suffered appendicitis, Sonja accurately guesses Colton is suffering from it.
“Heaven Is for Real (film)” enters the record as 2014 film by Randall Wallace. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Heaven, Real and film can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Heaven Is for Real (film)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Heaven, Real and film provides the most credible route into that argument.
Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q15728823. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2014 and 2010.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.
- Identifying works and editions
- Tracing reception history
- Finding collection records
The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Heaven Is for Real (film)”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Heaven Is for Real (film) primary sources, Heaven Is for Real (film) archive and Heaven research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Heaven Is for Real (film)”?
- How did later circulation or interpretation alter the work’s reception?
- Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Heaven Is for Real (film)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.