Newsbites: Pageant! Hannibal! Omen! Forge!
Newsbites: Pageant! Hannibal! Omen! Forge!
Recent stories about "faith-based" filmmakers, historical epics, and end-times thrillers that I've written about in the past.
Dallas Jenkins to direct The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
Dallas Jenkins, co-writer and director of the life-of-Jesus series The Chosen, is teaming up with the Erwin brothers, the guys who produced Jesus Revolution and I Can Only Imagine, to make a new film adaptation of Barbara Robinson’s book The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. Jenkins will start shooting the film in Canada next month.
This is how a press release describes the story:
Based on the beloved book and play, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever centers on the Herdmans – absolutely the worst kids in the history of the world. But this Christmas, they’re taking over their local church Pageant – and they just might unwittingly teach a shocked community the true meaning of Christmas.
This would be the first big-screen adaptation of Robinson’s book, which was previously turned into a 1983 TV-movie starring Loretta Swit and a then-unknown Fairuza Balk. The IMDb indicates there was also a German adaptation in 1975 called ‘Hilfe, die Herdmanns kommen’, i.e. ‘Help, the Herdmanns are coming’.
Jenkins and the Erwin brothers have supported each other’s work in the past—the Erwins visited the set of The Chosen last year, and Jenkins promoted Jesus Revolution in a video that played before The Chosen’s most recent theatrical release in February—but this, I think, would be their first official collaboration.
It will also be the first film that Jenkins has directed for the big screen since 2017’s The Resurrection of Gavin Stone—which, come to think of it, has certain parallels to The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, insofar as it, too, is a story about an outsider who gets involved in a church play. (An Easter play, in that case, but still.)
The new film will be released by Lionsgate, the studio behind the John Wick, Saw, and Hunger Games franchises. Lionsgate has been working with both Jenkins and the Erwins for a while now: it acquired worldwide distribution rights to The Chosen back in May, and it has had a long-term production deal with the Erwins since 2019.
Lionsgate is also the studio that released an adaptation of Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret earlier this year. Between that film and this one, it would seem someone there has a thing for popular early-1970s books for young people.
Jenkins spent 15 years trying to secure the rights to Robinson’s novel, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s got his brand of humour, and he’s definitely got a thing for Christmas, as evidenced by the multiple Christmas-themed episodes and music specials that The Chosen has put out. (The third such special comes to theatres next month.)
This raises an interesting question: If Jenkins is directing a Christmas movie that isn’t part of The Chosen, will there be a new Chosen-themed Christmas special next year? Or will the series—which has released something new every December since 2019—skip a year, on the assumption that all of its fans will want to check out the film instead?
We shall see, I guess.
Denzel Washington to play Hannibal of Carthage for Netflix
Deadline reports that Denzel Washington is reuniting with Antoine Fuqua—his director on Training Day, The Magnificent Seven, and the Equalizer trilogy—to make a movie about Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who famously used elephants, or tried to, in his fight against the Romans in the late third century BC.
The film is being produced by Netflix, and it will be written by John Logan, whose credits include Gladiator, Star Trek: Nemesis, Skyfall, and Alien: Covenant. He also did some uncredited work on the screenplay for Darren Aronofsky’s Noah.
Washington has been wanting to make this movie for a long, long time, and in fact I alluded to his ambitions in a blog post way back in 2006, when Vin Diesel was talking about making a Hannibal movie of his own with all the dialogue in ancient Punic. (This was two years after Mel Gibson filmed The Passion of the Christ in Latin and Aramaic. Ancient languages were a thing back then.)
At the time, Washington was in his mid- to late 40s, or slightly older than Hannibal was when the Second Punic War ended. Washington will be 69 next month, or a few years older than Hannibal was when he died after several years in exile.
It will be interesting to see if this film sparks a controversy similar to the one that erupted earlier this year when Netflix released a series that cast a black actress as Cleopatra, a descendant of Macedonian generals who may have also had some Iranian ancestry. To some Egyptians, the casting smacked of cultural appropriation.
Hannibal, for his part, was presumably descended from the Phoenicians, or Lebanese Canaanites, who colonized the Mediterranean and founded Carthage in the 9th century BC. (Among other things, they spread the Semitic alphabet that became the basis for the Greek alphabet and, thus, the Roman alphabet that you are now reading this in.) Carthage is in what we now call Tunisia, and I have no idea if modern Tunisians feel as strongly about this sort of thing as some Egyptians evidently do.
Other actors who have played Hannibal in English-language movies include Howard Keel (1955’s Jupiter’s Darling; age 35 at the time of the film’s release), Victor Mature (1959’s Hannibal; age 46), Alexander Siddig (2006’s Hannibal: Rome’s Worst Nightmare; age 40), and Nicholas Pinnock (2016’s Barbarians Rising; age 42).1
Incidentally, a quick Google indicates that Diesel, who is 56, was still talking about making his Hannibal movie—make that movies, plural, as he’s apparently planning a trilogy!—as recently as June 2021, as per this article in Men’s Health magazine.
The Omen prequel coming the week after Easter 2024
The end is coming… but this is not the end, this is the beginning of the end… or maybe it’s what happened before the beginning of the end…
Ahem. 20th Century Studios announced last week that The First Omen, a prequel to the end-times blockbuster The Omen, will be coming to theatres April 5.
This is how a press release describes the film’s story:
When a young American woman is sent to Rome to begin a life of service to the church, she encounters a darkness that causes her to question her own faith and uncovers a terrifying conspiracy that hopes to bring about the birth of evil incarnate.
So I guess it sounds like this movie is going to show us how the jackal that gave birth to Damien Thorn got impregnated with him in the first place…?
One thing this press release doesn’t clear up is exactly when the new movie takes place. The first three films came out between 1976 and 1981, and each one seemed to be taking place “today” even though Damien aged about 25 years in the five-year span between the first and third films. So does this film take place a few years before 1976 (i.e. 1970-ish), or maybe a few decades before 1981 (i.e. 1950-ish), or…?
The original film was remade in 2006. I suppose it’s possible the new film could be a prequel to that, but I would be very surprised if it was. (For what it’s worth, I interviewed John Moore, the director of the remake, when it came out.)
The new film stars Nell Tiger Free, the creepy nanny from Apple TV+’s Servant, as well as Tawfeek Barhom (James in 2018’s Mary Magdalene), Sonia Braga (1985’s Kiss of the Spider Woman), Ralph Ineson (2015’s The Witch), and Bill Nighy (2022’s Living).
The Kendrick brothers go the shared-universe route
Alex and Stephen Kendrick, the producers of such hit Christian movies as Facing the Giants and Fireproof, announced this week that their next film, The Forge, will be coming out in August 2024—and it will take place “in the same cinematic world” as War Room, one of the highest-grossing “faith-based” films of all time.
The Kendricks were pastors before they were filmmakers, and they make their movies as a conscious form of “ministry”, to promote certain messages. Movies of this sort aren’t my usual cup of tea, but—as one who has acted in church dramas myself—I do recognize that they have their place, and I’ve interviewed the Kendricks a few times and I like their indie can-do spirit. So I’ll probably see this one, too.
For what it’s worth, I rounded up some links to my reportage on the Kendricks in a 2014 blog post; it includes articles and interviews I did going back to 2006. And I got to interview Stephen Kendrick again after War Room came out in 2015.
War Room, which cost only $3 million to make, grossed $67.8 million in North America and was, for a time, “the top-grossing evangelical movie ever”.2 That title arguably now belongs to the Erwin brothers’ I Can Only Imagine, which earned $83.5 million in 2018, but War Room is still up there—and it will be interesting to see how the sequel, or spin-off, or whatever The Forge is, does compared to that.
(Incidentally, speaking of the Erwin brothers—again!—Alex Kendrick played a pastor in their 2014 comedy Moms’ Night Out. It all connects. It all connects.)
You can watch a “first look” at The Forge—a trailer, basically—here:
I cannot resist noting that all four of these actors have been in Bible movies: Keel played Peter in 1959’s The Big Fisherman; Mature played Samson in 1949’s Samson and Delilah, Demetrius in 1953’s The Robe and 1954’s Demetrius and the Gladiators, and Manoah in 1984’s Samson and Delilah; Siddig played Gabriel in 2006’s The Nativity Story; and Pinnock played a Zealot in 2015’s A.D. The Bible Continues and Jesus in 2023’s The Book of Clarence.
Neither Washington nor Diesel has ever, to my knowledge, been in a Bible movie.
The only “faith-based” films that had done better than War Room in North America were 2004’s The Passion of the Christ, which was deeply Catholic, and 2014’s Heaven Is for Real, which was rather secularized and definitely not an indie evangelical film.