Newsbites: Clarence! Chosen! Way of the Wind!
Two, maybe three, Bible movies are coming to theatres next year—and maybe a lot more than that, if you count each episode of The Chosen as a separate movie.
Time to catch up on some Bible-movie release-date news!
The Book of Clarence is now coming out in January
This news is a couple months old now, but better late than never: The Book of Clarence, a comedy (maybe?) set in the time of Jesus with a mostly-black cast, has been bumped from its original release date next month to January 12, 2024.
No reason was given for the delay, but it’s worth noting that the original release date fell right in the middle of festival season, whereas the new date is on a holiday weekend that could be better for the film’s box office. We shall see.1
The Chosen — will every episode of Season 4 go to theatres?
In a livestream two weeks ago, The Chosen writer-director Dallas Jenkins said Season 4 of his life-of-Jesus series, which he just finished shooting, will start coming out “sometime in January, February, probably February”—and, what’s more, he said every episode of the season might play in theatres first before going to streaming.
Jenkins did not say what sort of release pattern the series would follow, nor did he say who the distributor would be. But a few possibilities occur to me:
The Chosen’s first three theatrical releases—from the 2021 Christmas special to the Season 3 finale last February—were all handled by Fathom Events, which specializes in limited “specialty” releases. So the series could stick with Fathom if it just wanted to have each episode play in theatres for a few days.
Angel Studios, which has been streaming the show since it premiered in 2019, launched its own theatrical distribution unit in March and has had huge success with Sound of Freedom. So the series could go with Angel if it wanted a broader, more open-ended release—but The Chosen Inc. and Angel Studios seem to have parted ways somewhat, so this might require some mending of fences.2
Lionsgate has been handling The Chosen’s distribution worldwide since May—making deals with streaming platforms, TV networks, and the like, I believe—and it has also had theatrical success with “faith-based” films like Jesus Revolution. So the series could get Lionsgate to put Season 4 in theatres, too.
There may be other alternatives. But those seem like the most obvious ones.
In the meantime, you can watch Jenkins make the announcement at the 20-minute mark in the video below:
Incidentally, at one point in the video, Jenkins mentions that The Chosen was on the cover of TV Guide recently, and he says, “We’ve got to be one of the first times in history that an image, a portrayal of Jesus has been on the cover.”
As it happens, TV Guide has an online archive of all its covers going back to 1953, complete with search engine, and it turns out The Chosen marks at least the third time in the past quarter-century that an image of Jesus has filled the cover, and at least the fourth time that Jesus has appeared on the cover in any capacity. (One show—The Bible Collection: Jesus—even got two covers, but I’m counting those as one for the sake of this discussion because they were alternate covers for the same week.)
One last note: In a subsequent video that he texted to the show’s followers, Jenkins said Season 4 was coming out after the New Year because releasing Season 3 over the Christmas holidays turned out to be “not ideal”… but he said he was working on “something fun” to release this coming Christmas. So stay tuned for that.3
The Way of the Wind reportedly aiming for a 2024 release
Is the end finally in sight for The Way of the Wind?
Terrence Malick, the acclaimed director of Days of Heaven and Tree of Life, shot his life-of-Jesus movie nearly four years ago and has been editing it ever since, and we are finally getting hints that he might be nearing the end of the process.
And by “nearing the end”, I mean its release date could still be months away. Jordan Ruimy recently said he hears that Malick and his team are hoping to premiere the film next year—possibly at the Cannes film festival in May 2024—and producer Alex Boden told Variety last week that Malick is “very happy” with how the film is coming along… though he also said the film is “very much in the edit room at the moment”, which could mean that it is nowhere close to being finished yet. Who knows?
Malick, of course, is notorious for taking a long time in the editing room, and a four-and-a-half-year gap between production and release wouldn’t be entirely unprecedented for him; I believe Song to Song finished shooting in November 2012, and it didn’t get shown to the public until March 2017. So, we’ll see.
In the meantime, Mark Rylance—who plays Satan in the film—spoke to a Hungarian outlet last week about working on the film, and he addressed the film’s long post-production process (translated via Google): “I hope Terrence finishes the movie someday. . . . It’s like a bottle of wine or whiskey; it will only get better with time. Terrence is not in a hurry either, this is a very important story for him.”
Rylance also commented on how his performance as Satan contrasted with Hungarian actor Géza Röhrig’s performance as Jesus: “There I stood, as Satan, with 28 pages of monologue running through my mind, while Jesus barely uttered a word.”
This gets me thinking: Malick films are famous for their reliance on voice-over monologues—for throwing out a lot of the scripted dialogue and replacing it with breathy interior monologues—so, if the actor who played Jesus didn’t speak very much on-set, does that mean we’ll hear Jesus’ thoughts on the soundtrack? And while we’re at it, is it possible that Satan could get some voice-over dialogue, too?
There is still something kind of novel about films that take a subjective approach to Jesus—films that try to get inside his mind through dreams, voice-overs, point-of-view shots and the like—and it would be interesting to see what sort of inner thought life Malick gives to Jesus, especially if he explores the thoughts of other characters as well and puts them all on a somewhat level playing field, soundtrack-wise.
And of course, it will be interesting to see how Malick balances all the external speech in the gospels—all those sermons, all those parables, all those confrontations with religious and political leaders, etc., etc.—with his tendency to go inside people’s heads. The gospels are very outward-focused, and even the preaching within them tends to be very action-oriented; I’m not sure the same could be said of Malick.
Finally, there is one last weird bit of buzz about this film: Jordan Ruimy discovered a six-month-old interview with Mathieu Kassovitz the other day in which Kassovitz talked about working on Malick’s film and, apparently, had this to say:
Kassovitz says the movie is actually about Saint Peter (Matthias Schoenaerts) and he plays a small role as Jesus’ brother John. He has a scene where he yells at Jesus and tells him to stop smoking weed with his friends and to go help his mother with the cattle.
I don’t know more than a few words or phrases in French, so I can’t say how accurate Ruimy’s summary is, or whether Kassovitz was making a joke that got lost in translation, etc. So I don’t know how seriously we should take this.
But I did catch the phrase “frère de Jésus” when I listened to the interview, so that part of the summary seems to be accurate, at least—and if John is being portrayed as Jesus’ brother in this film, then that would be… odd, given that the biblical Jesus had four brothers and none of them were named John (Mark 6:3, Matthew 13:55).
Then again, maybe “brother” is a euphemism for “beloved disciple”? Or maybe “brother” is a euphemism for “cousin”, and the sons of Zebedee are being portrayed as part of Jesus’ extended family?4 Or maybe Kassovitz is just pulling our legs.
Also, if that bit about “smoking weed” is correct, then this would be the second Jesus movie to depict marijuana use next year, following The Book of Clarence.
Also, if the film really does portray Jesus’ family as farmers who own cattle, then that would be… weird, as the tradition has always maintained that Jesus and his father were carpenters, and at least one scholar has suggested that the underlying Greek word for their profession had less to do with the work they did and more to do with their ultra-low social status as “landless laborers” and “dispossessed peasants”.
Anyway. The relevant part of the interview starts at the 44:33 mark in the video below:
And, with that, I think we’re all caught up. More later, maybe.
Director Jeymes Samuel’s previous film, The Harder They Fall, played at a couple of festivals and got a big awards push in the fall of 2021, so there was reason to think that his new film might get an awards push, too.
It’s not entirely clear to me why Angel Studios and The Chosen Inc. parted ways—it appears that Angel merely has first-streaming rights to the show now—but, as I mentioned a few months ago, Angel Studios released a statement last May clarifying who has rights to what at the moment. And there was apparently some legal wrangling the month before that.
The Chosen has released something new every Christmas for the past four years—the second half of Season 1 in 2019, the first Christmas special in 2020, the second Christmas special (with bonus episode) in 2021, the first few episodes of Season 3 in 2022—so it would be odd indeed if Christmas 2023 came and went without some new bit of Chosen-ness.
There are, in fact, traditions that link John and his brother James—the sons of Zebedee—to the family of Jesus, usually through their mother, who is assumed to be Salome, the female disciple who witnessed the Crucifixion and was part of the group that found the empty tomb in Mark’s gospel (cf Mark 15:40, 16:1; Matthew 27:56). The traditions apparently differ on whether Salome was Mary’s sister, which would make James and John the cousins of Jesus, or Mary’s step-daughter, which would make them the nephews of Jesus.