Newsbites: Thorn! Chosen! Rising! Anniversaries!
Newsbites: Thorn! Chosen! Rising! Anniversaries!
Four quick news items, all about Jesus movies and shows past, present, and future.
The Thorn brings “cirque meets the passion of Jesus” to home theatres
There once was a time—over a century ago, when movies tended to be short and they were often played between live-entertainment acts—when certain people complained that it would be “both bad taste and artistically ineffective to sandwich [a Jesus movie] between a juggler’s act and a Broadway song and dance.”1 Those concerns had largely flown out the window by the time Godspell came out in the early 1970s, but I must confess that I paused when I first heard about The Thorn, a sort of acrobatic spectacle that advertises itself as “cirque meets the passion of Jesus”. A specific focus on the death of Jesus, contextualized within a sort of circus act? Um, okay… I have since seen the show for myself, and I may say something about it later, once I’ve cleared a few things off my plate. In the meantime, the live version of The Thorn is currently touring the southern United States, and people who don’t live there can now, as of today, book virtual cinema tickets to watch the show at home between now and the end of April.
The Chosen starts shooting Season 4
The Chosen started shooting its fourth season today. The show’s producers announced the start of production on their various social-media accounts, and series creator Dallas Jenkins texted a video to the show’s fans in which he said the shoot would last 75 days, and he said he would be hosting a livestream this Sunday, April 2, to let the fans know how the first week went. Season 3 started shooting in late April 2022 and it premiered just seven months later, so if Season 4 is starting even earlier in the year, odds are good we’ll be seeing new episodes by Christmas again. (Oh, hey, question: Will there be some sort of Chosen Season 4 promo attached to His Only Son when it opens this Friday? They’re coming from the same studio, after all, and in this day and age it couldn’t be too hard to get a new video into theatres by the weekend…)2
Lux Vide is still planning its own multi-season Jesus series
Speaking of multi-season Jesus shows, every now and then I have wondered what happened to The Rising, the three-season series about Jesus that Lux Vide—the company behind the Emmy-winning Bible Collection series—announced two years ago. Well, last week, Lux Vide CEO Luca Bernabei gave an interview to Screen Daily in which he indicated, almost in passing, that The Rising was still in active development. As he put it: “we are working on The Rising, a historical drama series that will focus on the human and spiritual story of Jesus Christ, told from his point of view. It will be an entertaining and inspiring show, aimed at everyone, especially young people.” For more info on what Bernabei is planning, see the interviews that I linked to in June 2021 and July 2021.
Just noting a couple of Jesus-movie anniversaries
Speaking of Godspell, I’ve been so busy lately that I forgot to note that that film’s 50th anniversary came and went just six days ago. Godspell was the first of three modern musicals about Jesus that came out in 1973: it premiered on March 21, and it was followed by Johnny Cash’s The Gospel Road on March 31 (that anniversary is just four days from now!) and by Jesus Christ Superstar a few months later (that film apparently premiered on June 26 but didn’t go into wide release until August 15). I haven’t written all that much about Godspell, aside from including it on my “top ten Jesus movies” list back in 2006, but I’ve watched it a lot because one of my kids is a big fan of the film, and of course it’s the first of three biblical musicals by Stephen Schwartz, whose work on The Prince of Egypt I have written quite a lot about. So I wanted to acknowledge the anniversary before it receded too far into the past. Incidentally, fans of counter-cultural Jesus movies might be amused to see that, when the New York Times ran Vincent Canby’s review of Godspell the day after it came out, the review appeared on the same page as an ad for Robert Downey Sr.’s Greaser’s Palace, which came out in the summer of 1972 but I guess was still in theatres at the time.
That’s a quote from the October 23, 1912 issue of The New York Dramatic Mirror, which I once quoted in a March 2000 article on Jesus movies for Books & Culture.
For comparison, John Wick: Chapter 4 co-star Lance Reddick passed away just six days before the film came out, and the credits were modified so that the film could be dedicated to him before it started playing to the public.