Newsbites: Scorsese! Forty-Seven Days! Pageant! Unbreakable! Cabrini! Sight! Etc.!
Newsbites: Scorsese! Forty-Seven Days! Pageant! Unbreakable! Cabrini! Sight! Etc.!
Quick updates on some upcoming biblical and/or "faith-based" movies.
I’ve been so busy reporting on the fact of The Chosen Season 4’s theatrical release these past few weeks that I haven’t had to time to comment on the content of the new episodes yet. I hope to start doing that sometime next week, after I’ve reported on the next phase of the release (i.e. the first-weekend box-office stats).
In the meantime, here are some other news items that caught my eye in the past week or so, which I wanted to pass along before they got too old.
Scorsese to start shooting his new Jesus movie in April?
The last time we checked in on Martin Scorsese’s new Jesus movie, he was talking about shooting it sometime this year. Now he’s being a bit more specific with the timeline—just a bit—as he recently told the Jesuit magazine America that he hopes to start shooting “some of it” in April, “to get it going.”
He also said he’s still “not quite sure” how much of the film will be set in the ancient world and how much of it will be set today. Scorsese first revealed his plan to mix modern and biblical footage in a treatment that was posted to the La Civiltà Cattolica website last February, and he has restated that plan several times since.
Meanwhile, Scorsese had another meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican on Wednesday. He gave the Pope a book of photos from his most recent film, Killers of the Flower Moon, which is currently nominated for ten Academy Awards.
The Oscar ceremony is on March 10 this year, so it looks like Scorsese will dive into the new Jesus film once he’s put all the hype around Killers firmly behind him.
Forty-Seven Days with Jesus comes to theatres in March
Fathom Events may be busy with The Chosen Season 4 from now until the second Sunday in March, but once that series finishes its theatrical release, Fathom is diving right back into the Jesus-movie genre with Forty-Seven Days with Jesus.
The film stars Yoshi Barrigas (The Chosen’s original Philip) and Catherine Lidstone (The Chosen’s Mary of Bethany) as a modern-day couple dealing with various issues who share with their family the story of “Jesus’ final 47 days on Earth,” which I’m guessing means the 47 days between Palm Sunday and the Ascension.
Jesus and his mother Mary will be played in the flashbacks by Jonathan Byram and his real-life mother Cassie. The Byram family is no stranger to Bible stories; Jonathan’s father Amick was the singing voice of Moses in 1998’s The Prince of Egypt.
The film will be in theatres March 11, 12, and 14. Tickets are available here.
Lauren Graham joins The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
Deadline reports that Lauren Graham has joined the cast of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, which just finished shooting in Winnipeg. Graham will play the film’s narrator.
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is being directed by The Chosen creator Dallas Jenkins between seasons of his show, and it counts The Chosen co-stars Kirk B.R. Woller, Vanessa Benavente, and Elizabeth Tabish among its cast members.
The film is currently set for a November 15 release.
Side note: I took part in a roundtable interview with Graham when she played Steve Carell’s wife in 2007’s Evan Almighty. You can read a bit of that here.
The Unbreakable Boy finally comes to theatres next year
Deadline reports that Lionsgate and Kingdom Story, the studios behind The Best Christmas Pageant Ever and Jesus Revolution, also announced this week that they will be releasing The Unbreakable Boy on February 21, 2025.
The film stars Zachary Levi as a father who comes to terms with his son’s autism and osteogenesis imperfecta (brittle bone disease).
This movie has been in the can for a while. I have a press release from August 2021 that says The Unbreakable Boy had already been “developed and produced” by then, and a Singaporean distributor posted a trailer for the film to its YouTube account in December 2021, touting a release date in March 2022.
The director, Jon Gunn, has since gone on to make another movie, Ordinary Angels, which almost came out last year but got bumped because of the Hollywood strikes. That film is now coming out just a few weeks from now, on February 23.
Angel Studios sets dates for Cabrini and Sight, prepares for CinemaCon
There’s been a lot of news coming out of Angel Studios—the distributor behind Sound of Freedom, His Only Son, and The Shift—this week.
First, they announced a bunch of international release dates for Cabrini, the next film they’re releasing from Sound of Freedom director Alejandro Monteverde; it tells the story of Mother Francesca Cabrini, an Italian immigrant and missionary who became the first US citizen to be canonized a saint in the Roman Catholic church.
The film will apparently open first in Hungary on March 7, and then it will open in North America, France, Croatia, South Africa, and Taiwan on International Women’s Day, March 8. It will then go to the UK, Mexico, and Brazil by March 22.
Next, Angel acquired global distribution rights to Sight, which tells the story of Dr Ming Wang, a Chinese immigrant who became a world-renowned eye surgeon.
That film was directed by Andrew Hyatt, whose credits include Full of Grace, Paul Apostle of Christ, and the Phil Robertson biopic The Blind, which is currently the top-grossing Fathom Events release of all time. I interviewed Hyatt when The Blind came out on DVD in November, and we spoke briefly about Sight at the time.
Angel plans to release Sight in theatres May 24.
(Incidentally, quick side note to anyone living in the Vancouver area: There will be a preview screening of Sight—which was filmed in Vancouver—at the Evangelical Chinese Bible Church in Burnaby tonight at 6pm, and Dr Ming Wang will be there in person. There was also a screening at Tenth Church last night.)
Finally, IndieWire reports that Angel Studios will be putting on a full presentation at CinemaCon in April while certain other studios sit the event out:
This year, CinemaCon will feature a distributor on stage at Caesar’s Palace in front of every theater owner in the country, out to prove its dedication to theatrical. It’s not Apple, or Amazon and MGM, or Sony, which opened last year’s convention but will sit out this year. It’s Angel Studios, the distributor behind last year’s surprise box-office smash “Sound of Freedom.” . . .
Ahead of CinemaCon, Angel will release “Cabrini” on March 8. At some point in 2024, it will also release the World War II spy story “Bonhoefer” and the animated musical “David” about David and Goliath. Both are expected to preview at CinemaCon. The distributor also acquired the biopic film “Sight” starring Greg Kinnear, for a May 24 release.
I’m intrigued by the claim that David might come out sometime this year. In the FAQ on the website for the film’s crowd-funding campaign—over $53 million raised already!—it currently says, “It takes a long time to create an animated film. We expect to release the movie in 2025.” But maybe plans have changed?
The Shift was originally going to come out in January, i.e. last month, but then it got moved up to December. Maybe something similar is happening here.
In any case, here are a few trailers for the upcoming Angel films:
First, the most recent—and, uh, Shania Twain-themed—trailer for Cabrini:
Here is a trailer for Sight that was released almost five months ago, before the film was acquired by Angel:
Here is the teaser trailer for Bonhoeffer, which is currently set for a November release:
And here is a recently-released teaser trailer for Homestead, which stars The Shift’s Neal McDonough and does not have a release date yet: