Newsbites: Scorsese's Jesus! The Chosen!
Quick updates on a couple of upcoming Jesus movies.
Scorsese plans to start shooting his next Jesus movie this year
Martin Scorsese was profiled in the Los Angeles Times today, and along the way, he revealed that he plans to start shooting his new Jesus movie sometime this year, and he says it will probably be about 80 minutes long when it’s done:
Scorsese has completed the screenplay for that film, collaborating with critic and filmmaker Kent Jones, and plans to shoot it later this year. They’re still “swimming in inspiration,” he tells me, still figuring it out. It’ll be based on Shūsaku Endō’s book “A Life of Jesus.” (Endō also wrote “Silence.”) And it’ll be set mostly in the present day, though Scorsese doesn’t want to be locked into a certain period, because he wants the film to feel timeless. He envisions the movie to run around 80 minutes, focusing on Jesus’ core teachings in a way that explores the principles but doesn’t proselytize.
“I’m trying to find a new way to make it more accessible and take away the negative onus of what has been associated with organized religion,” Scorsese says.
For what it’s worth, a lot of these details aren’t new.
A treatment for the film, which indicated it would be set partly in the present day, was posted to the La Civiltà Cattolica website last February, three months before Scorsese announced his intention to make the film at a press conference in May. And Scorsese first revealed Endō’s influence on the film in an interview in October.
The participation of Kent Jones is new to me, though. He’s best-known for his documentary work, some of it with Scorsese, though he also directed the 2018 narrative feature Diane, which starred Mary Kay Place as a woman whose adult son, played by Jake Lacy, is a drug addict who becomes a born-again Christian.
The Chosen Season 4 gets a new trailer, box office forecast
Box Office Pro has posted a “long range forecast” for the weekend of February 2-4. In it, they estimate that The Chosen Season 4: Episodes 1-3 will gross $7-11 million over the weekend, and $11-18 million over the course of its entire theatrical run.
That would be on par with the 2021 Christmas special and the Season 3 premiere in 2022, which both made just over/under $14 million during their runs.
It would also be a lot better than the $5.5 million that the Season 3 finale grossed last February—but that release was handled much differently from this one. For starters, it was announced only 2½ weeks in advance, not 3½ months in advance; and everyone knew the Season 3 finale would start streaming just a few days later, whereas I don’t believe the streaming plans for Season 4 will even be announced until March.
So, everyone has had time to make their moviegoing plans, and everyone has some degree of incentive to go to the theatre to see Season 4 as soon as possible, instead of waiting who knows how much longer to watch it at home.
Box Office Pro does not yet have forecasts for the weekends when the other two installments of The Chosen Season 4 will be coming to theatres. Episodes 4-6 will be in theatres February 15, and Episodes 7-8 will be in theatres February 29.
In the meantime, The Chosen Season 4 has a new trailer, and you can watch it here: