Newsbites: Clarence! Prince of Egypt! Kingdom Story! Celestials! Omens!
New posters, new release dates, new anniversaries, and new movies and shows about angels and demons.
The Book of Clarence gets new posters, sneak-peeks in Atlanta
There are only three and a half weeks to go until the quasi-biblical quasi-comedy The Book of Clarence comes to theatres, and we have a few new things to report:
Sony Pictures has released ten new character posters for the film, featuring both biblical and fictitious characters. You can see nine of the posters above. (I would have posted all ten, but Substack galleries have a nine-image limit.)
Still no images of Benedict Cumberbatch. Hmmm.
Director Jeymes Samuel and lead actor LaKeith Stanfield attended a screening of the film in Atlanta, Georgia last week.
Janeé Bolden at Global Grind got some red-carpet interviews with both men.
Asked what he wants the audience to take away from the film, Samuel said: “I want audiences to take away, like, inspiration. I want them to take away the fact that it’s all possible and knowledge is stronger than belief, that you can believe all you like, but have knowledge, have knowledge of God, have knowledge of self, have knowledge of the world, have knowledge of your environment and of your life. Like, knowledge is stronger than belief. And you can do it, man. You can do it. I really want people to walk away inspired and with the knowledge of self. Yeah, motivated, you know what I mean? Spiritually motivated.”
I might be forgetting something, but I think this is the first time I’ve seen one of the actors promote the film. When the film had its world premiere in October, Stanfield couldn’t do any publicity because of the actors’ strike.
Samuel and Stanfield also attended a “breaking bread dinner” in Atlanta.
I don’t know anything about the dinner beyond the fact that it happened at a private club called The Gathering Spot, but you can see photos of some of the people who attended it at the Getty Images website.
Samuel and Stanfield also did a short interview on The Big Tigger Morning Show to promote the film while they were in Atlanta. (December 20 update: A longer version of the interview is now up on YouTube.)
One of the things some people have mentioned in their reviews of the film is that it has some possibly jarring shifts in tone, and Samuel seems to be acknowledging that in the interview when he says the film’s third act “is challenging for people because our lives are challenging.”
Stanfield and co-star RJ Cyler, who plays Clarence’s friend Elijah, also did a video interview with EURweb.
Stanfield sums up the trajectory of the film like so: “One black man follows the path of all black men that follows the path of all men, which is going from one state to another state and learning through trial and tribulation how to become a better man.”
Box Office Pro has posted its first long-range box-office forecast for the film.
The Book of Clarence is one of three films opening on the Martin Luther King Jr Day weekend, along with the Jason Statham action flick The Beekeeper and the musical version of Mean Girls.
Box Office Pro thinks it could be the lowest-grossing film of the bunch, with an opening weekend of $7-15mil and a total haul of $15-35mil.
The site notes that the film’s mix of biblical and “progressive” content could be a challenge for moviegoers who are used to either one or the other.
It also notes that the film could suffer if the musical version of The Color Purple, which opens Christmas Day, has any staying power at the box office. (The two films are opening less than three weeks apart.)
You can watch the latest trailer for the film here, and you can watch my chat with 100 Bible Films author Matt Page about the film here (he’s seen it; I haven’t yet).
Directors, songwriter look back at the making of The Prince of Egypt
The Prince of Egypt turned 25 yesterday, and the people who made the film marked the occasion with a few new interviews and videos.
Cartoon Brew has short videos from all three of the film’s directors—Steve Hickner, Brenda Chapman, and Simon Wells—talking about how they developed the Red Sea sequence as well as two of film’s most impressive musical numbers.
Among other things, Hickner talks about how the Oscar-winning ‘When You Believe’ was conceived as both “an anthem for the movie” and as “the anthem of the DreamWorks company”, which adds an interesting subtext to the original lyric “You can work miracles when you believe,” which was changed to “There can be miracles when you believe” after objections were raised by religious consultants.
Meanwhile, songwriter Stephen Schwartz spoke to Variety’s ‘Stagecraft’ podcast last week to discuss how he expanded The Prince of Egypt into a stage musical.
Among other things, he said (starting at the 5:53 mark) that it was DreamWorks co-founder Steven Spielberg who said the original film should be “a brother story”, i.e. a story about two brothers who love each other but are torn apart by destiny:
How do we tell that personal story, and then ultimately how they come to reconciliation? And I think we were able to do that a lot more fully in the stage show than we were in the animated feature. It’s less good guy / bad guy, even though we really tried to avoid that even in the animated feature, but more strongly in the stage show. It was important to us that this not become a story of ‘my God is better than your god’, but a story of the need for empathy, the need for being able to look at a situation through someone else’s eyes—obviously a quality much lacking in contemporary society. And we see in some ways the same old grievances that exist in Prince of Egypt being played out in our headlines today, in the horrible situation in the Middle East. I wish this show were less contemporary than it turns out it is.
The stage musical became available for digital rental and purchase earlier this month. I reviewed it here and talked to Matt Page (yes, him again!) about it here.
Lionsgate, Kingdom Story announce 2024 movie slate
Lionsgate and the Kingdom Story Company have announced five films that they will be releasing under their joint banner next year.
Two of these films were originally going to come out this year, until the actors’ strike prompted the studio to delay them until such time as the actors would be available to promote them. And one of those films is, interestingly, a movie that wasn’t actually produced by Kingdom Story, but the “faith-based” production company has now come on board to “leverage its reach to audiences” in promoting the film.
The film in question is White Bird, a sort of sequel or spin-off to 2017’s Wonder, starring Helen Mirren as an old Jewish woman who tells her grandson stories about living in Nazi-occupied France. As far as I can tell, Kingdom Story—which was founded by the makers of I Can Only Imagine and Jesus Revolution—was not involved in this film at all until its new release date was announced late last week.
It’s a little reminiscent of how Sony made 2019’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, the Mister Rogers movie starring Tom Hanks, for a general audience and then promoted it through their “faith-based” Affirm Films division after it was finished. In that case, the movie was about a man of faith and it did have scenes of prayer. I don’t know what there is in White Bird that the studio might “leverage”.
In any case, White Bird is now set to come out on October 4, 2024 (the same day as the Joker sequel!). The other four films coming out next year are (with the studio’s one-line descriptions of them, plus links to my past coverage of two of them):
February 23 — Ordinary Angels — A true story of the power of a community rallying together to help one of their own in need, starring Hilary Swank and Alan Ritchson
April 26 — Unsung Hero — The origin story of Grammy Award-winning artist-family for King + Country and Rebecca St. James.
Fall 2024 — The Best Christmas Pageant Ever — In collab with the creator of The Chosen, Dallas Jenkins, based on the best-selling novel. The film stars Judy Greer and Pete Holmes.
2024 date TBA — The Unbreakable Boy — A true story based on a young boy with a rare brittle bone disease and autism whose joyous spirit inspires those around him, starring Zachary Levi and Meghann Fahy.
That last film, incidentally, has been in the can for a while, now. I just checked my e-mail archives and I have a press release from August 2021 that says The Unbreakable Boy had already been “developed and produced” even then. It’s from the same director as Ordinary Angels, Jon Gunn, and it appears to have been directed before that film.
Anyway. Here are the most recent trailers for the four films that have them (basically all of them except for Pageant, which is currently being filmed in Winnipeg):
American-Ecuadorian filmmakers to tackle the war in Heaven
Deadline reports that 8th Gear Entertainment, a production company based in Miami and Ecuador, is developing “a new biblical film franchise” that will start with a movie called Celestials. The official synopsis describes the plot like so:
In the serene heart of the Heavens, as Lucifer questions the very fabric of angelic existence, a division grows, leading to a celestial war that threatens to tear apart the divine realm, with destinies forever changed. In a realm of celestial brilliance, angels live in harmony. The Morning Star, Lucifer, shines brightest, leading the heavenly choir. But beneath this harmony, Lucifer’s growing doubts about the angelic purpose create ripples of dissent. From hushed conversations to grand debates, he gathers a faction yearning for change.
Michael, the guardian warrior, sees this ambition as a threat, and the realm stands divided. Tensions climax when Lucifer demands a new order. Refused, war ignites the heavens. As cities crumble and the skies darken, Raphael and Uriel combine their strengths, devising a plan to restore peace while Gabriel’s call for unity reverberates. But the costs of war are high, and by its end, the heavens, though healing, are forever scarred.
The production company has also released some concept art:
Writer-producer James Leon says the movie will remain “true to the bible”, but how much of this plot is actually from the Bible in the first place? Raphael and Uriel aren’t even mentioned in the scriptures that are accepted by all Jews and Christians.
Deadline reports that one of the film’s executive producers will be Gerardo Mejia, an “artist, businessman, and Christian pastor best known internationally for his popular 1990s single Rico Suave” who also goes by the name Papa G.
Good Omens gets a third and final season at Amazon
Variety reports that Amazon has greenlit a third and final season for Good Omens, the series based on Neil Gaiman and the late Terry Pratchett’s book about an angel and a demon who, in the first season, teamed up to prevent the apocalypse.
The stakes were a lot lower in the second season, but it appears the third season will take us back to the end times. As Gaiman puts it: “The plans for Armageddon are going wrong. Only Crowley [Michael Sheen’s angel] and Aziraphale [David Tennant’s demon] working together can hope to put it right. And they aren’t talking.”
I wasn’t a fan of the second season, which came out in July, but I’ve been thinking about writing about it because, like the first season, it had some interesting flashbacks to the biblical era; it did some interesting things with the book of Job, in particular. But I’ve had a lot of other things on my plate. We’ll see.