Newsbites: Scorsese's Jesus! The Shift's new trailer!
Newsbites: Scorsese's Jesus! The Shift's new trailer!
Angel Studios is releasing its next theatrical film sooner than expected.
Scorsese confirms certain details about his next Jesus movie
Martin Scorsese got a long profile in Time magazine today, and near the end he talks about that Jesus movie he said he wanted to make last May. “I don’t know what it’s going to be, exactly,” he says. “I don’t know what you’d call it. It wouldn’t be a straight narrative. . . . But there would be staged scenes. And I’d be in it.” Some people have responded as though this interview were telling us something new, but as I noted in June, the treatment for Scorsese’s film has been available online since February, and everything Scorsese says about the film in this Time interview is in there.
The Shift moves its release date up to December
Several films that were going to come out this year—Dune: Part Two, Kraven the Hunter, The Book of Clarence, possibly even the “faith-based” Ordinary Angels—have been bumped to next year, thanks in part to the actors’ strike. But one film is defying that trend. The Shift—a sort of sci-fi take on the book of Job produced by Angel Studios, the company behind The Chosen and Sound of Freedom—was going to come out in January, as per a trailer that was released in April, but now, this week, Angel has released a new trailer that says the film is coming out December 1. Notably, The Shift is the first film that Angel Studios has actually produced, or at any rate the first film that was financed through the crowdfunding model that Angel introduced for streaming shows like The Chosen; His Only Son and Sound of Freedom were filmed years before Angel Studios existed1 and were picked up for distribution after they were completed. The Shift stars North Shore’s Kristoffer Polaha, Yellowstone’s Neal McDonough, The Lord of the Rings’ Sean Astin, and The Chosen’s Liz Tabish, Paras Patel, and Jordan Walker Ross.
Sound of Freedom was filmed in 2018, His Only Son was filmed in 2019, and Angel Studios—which began as the production arm of VidAngel—became its own entity in 2021. Angel launched its own theatrical distribution unit in March 2023.