Some of history’s most famous fiction—think Homer’s Odyssey or the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice—tells the tale of a hero’s journey to the underworld. These stories have survived and inspired through the ages because they’re epics of adventure and wonder set against a backdrop that we find endlessly fascinating. But nowadays the afterlife is box-office poison. Take two recent films by directors known for wowing both the critics and the masses: Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter and Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones. Both attempted a serious depiction of life after death. Both bombed.

Jackson had previously done justice to the geek bible, the 1,200-page LotR trilogy, convincing jaded 21st-century viewers that New Zealand was actually Middle-earth. But adapting Alice Sebold’s slender, best-selling novel about how heaven looks to a young girl vanquished him. Jackson explained to Variety how tricky it was to portray that mythic place: “It has to be somehow ethereal and emotional, but it can’t be hokey.” If you trust Metacritic, he failed that balancing act.

You may consider the task impossible. In his pan of the film, Roger Ebert provided a very specific description of what paradise isn’t: “Heaven—by definition outside time and space—would have neither colors nor a lack of colors, would be a state with no sensations. Nor would there be thinking there, let alone narration.” Lotsa luck filming that!

It’s not simply a challenge to visualize the ineffable; it’s also hard to spin an involving story about what happens after you die. Try to think of a really good movie that doesn’t play the afterlife for laughs. There isn’t one. (Joel Schumacher’s Flatliners, really? What Dreams May Come, with Robin Williams wading through lakes of paint?) The typical film about the realm of the dead is a better brief for new atheism than anything dreamed up by Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens.

The only cinematic visions of the afterlife that are worth a damn are the ones that depict damnation. As long as your hero goes to hell, the audience stays engaged. Move the story upstairs, though, and God help you. This was true well before Jackson saw the light. The first volume of Dante’s Divine Comedy, in which the poet visits hell, has captured the public imagination for centuries and continues to inspire film (and even videogame) adaptations. But the second and third portions, which depict purgatory and heaven, are known mostly to literary scholars. (Many translators call it quits after the Inferno.)

Hell has proven useful to filmmakers looking for spectacle or a great villain. But heaven, which would seem like a great source of the kind of happy ending Hollywood loves, simply lacks drama. (There’s a reason the words “And they lived happily ever after” appear right before the credits roll—happily ever after is boring.)

Yet painting and music have long evoked a sense of awe at the prospect of the divine. So it’s not a hopeless task for artists. (Have you heard of Michelangelo? Handel’s “Messiah”?) Shouldn’t moviemakers be able to do the same?

The infinite canvas of digital filmmaking has made it possible. Thanks to the magic of greenscreen and motion-capture, things with no referent in reality—like the Thundersmurfs and floating islands of Avatar—feel as if they’ve come to life. Increasingly, moviemaking can realize the wildest visions of sci-fi and fantasy. And what is more unreal than the ecstasy that so many people dream they’ll find in the hereafter? Now that directors have the tech to make the ethereal corporeal, one of them may film a Sistine Chapel for the new millennium.

So let’s get going. Looking for your next act, James Cameron? Want to make your mark on history? Heaven can’t wait.

Chris Suellentrop (chris.suellentrop @gmail.com) is a story editor at The New York Times Magazine.