Newsbites: Covenant! Noah! Godspell! Chosen!
Newsbites: Covenant! Noah! Godspell! Chosen!
A word-for-word Old Testament movie, Noah rises up the Netflix charts, Judd Apatow produces a Godspell documentary, and The Chosen comes back to theatres.
Just a few quick notes here about some films with a biblical theme (or connection).
The Lumo Project’s word-for-word Gospel adaptations get a prequel and a sequel… and maybe another prequel?
For several months now, I’ve been meaning to write about a film called The Covenant. It’s produced by The Lumo Project, the British group that made the first-ever word-for-word adaptation of all four gospels about a decade ago. (I interviewed the director of those films here.)
The Covenant is basically a prequel to those films that dramatizes key moments from the five books of Moses, from the creation of the world to the Israelites’ arrival at the edge of the Promised Land. It’s not a complete adaptation of the Torah, because that would take too many hours to watch (much of which would be quite repetitive), but every bit that does appear in the film is taken word-for-word from the Bible. And the film uses a bit of Ezra and Nehemiah, too, as a framing device.
I bring this up now because Relevant magazine posted an interview last week with The Lumo Project’s founder, Hannah Leader. She talks about the thinking behind the Project’s various films, including The Covenant, and she also drops some tantalizing hints about what’s coming next from The Lumo Project:
Well, we’ve just finished filming The Acts of the Apostles. That took a while because that’s a long book. So it’s going to be a series of four, one-hour films. It comes to four hours altogether, but it’s complete, nothing has been cut out. It’s word for word, the whole of The Acts of the Apostles. We filmed it in Bulgaria and Morocco. We’re expecting to have it all done by July.
For what it’s worth, The Visual Bible made a word-for-word adaptation of Acts in 1994—starring Dean Jones as Luke, James Brolin as Peter, and Francesco “son of Anthony” Quinn as Stephen, among others—and it came to a little more than three hours.
Leader also reveals:
We’re also thinking of doing a Covenant II, maybe after the Acts, which will be King David’s story because, obviously, The Covenant stops when Moses arrives at the Holy Land before the fall of Jericho. There’s quite a lot more of the Old Testament to do, so we might see if we can manage to do that as well.
So we can add that to the list of David films that are currently in development.
Darren Aronofsky’s Noah cracks the Netflix top ten… again!
I noted three months ago that Darren Aronofsky’s Noah was one of the most-watched movies on Netflix during the first half of 2023. Now comes word that it’s rising up the weekly Netflix top ten list! Last week, Netflix said the film was #10 worldwide for the week of March 4-10, and now they say it was #5 for the week of March 11-17.
As you can see, the film went up in hours viewed, from 6.2 million two weeks ago to 8.1 million last week. If you divide those hours by the film’s runtime (2 hours and 17 minutes), you get an upswing from 2.7 million views to 3.5 million views.
Netflix also says the film has been in the Top 10 for five weeks—but not continuously, it would seem, as I have scrolled back to the beginning of the year, and Noah does not show up on any other Top 10 list this year (although Exodus: Gods and Kings, which also came out in 2014, cracked the list for the first time ever the week of January 1-7!).
What accounts for Noah’s surge in popularity? Maybe the fact that it’s celebrating its 10th anniversary next week (on March 28). Or maybe that’s just a coincidence.
At any rate, this reminds me, I need to finish that Noah analysis I started last year.
Judd Apatow producing documentary about legendary Godspell production
Deadline reports that Judd Apatow is executive-producing a documentary about the legendary 1972 Toronto production of Godspell.
The musical, based on the parables (and death) of Jesus, premiered Off-Broadway in 1971 and was turned into a feature film in 1973. But the Toronto production is especially noteworthy because it featured an all-Canadian cast and helped to launch the careers of many actors, comedians, and musicians, including:
Victor Garber, who played Jesus in the 1973 film and has since gone on to appear in everything from Alias and The Orville to James Cameron’s Titanic;
Gilda Radner, who went on to co-star in the early seasons of Saturday Night Live;
Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Dave Thomas, and Martin Short, all of whom went on to star on SCTV (Short also worked on SNL for one year); and
Howard Shore and Paul Schaffer, both of whom went on to do music for Saturday Night Live before turning to other ventures (Shore has written many film scores and won three Oscars for The Lord of the Rings, while Shaffer went on to become David Letterman’s band leader and sidekick for over 30 years).
As the Toronto Star put it in a 50th-anniversary retrospective two years ago, “Never in the history of Canadian theatre has there been a single company whose members would go on to find such success.”
It doesn’t sound like Apatow’s film will have much to say about the biblical aspects of the musical—indeed, it might not have much to say about the musical itself, per se—as its primary focus is the comedy scene in Toronto, and how this version of the musical propelled many of that scene’s greatest talents to even greater success.
Still, if you’re a fan of the musical, it could be worth a look. We shall see.
The Chosen Season 4 returns to theatres… for one weekend
As we learned nearly two weeks ago, “legal matters” are preventing The Chosen from launching its fourth season on streaming platforms right now—so the season is coming back to North American theatres for the tail end of Holy Week:
Episodes 1-3 will play in theatres on Maundy Thursday, March 28
Episodes 4-6 will play in theatres on Good Friday, March 29
Episodes 7-8 will play in theatres on Holy Saturday, March 30
The Chosen Season 4 was released to theatres in its entirety over the course of February. As of last Sunday, it had grossed about $29.8 million (Episodes 1-3 made $13.9 million, Episodes 4-6 made $8.9 million, and Episodes 7-8 made $7 million). That accounts for nearly half of the $68.3 million that the series has earned theatrically since Christmas with The Chosen: The Messengers came out in December 2021.
You can order tickets for these screenings at TheChosenRiseUp.com.
Interesting news on the Godspell front. I knew that Paul Schaffer’s big break in New York was for the movie, and that he had done the music in Canada version, but didn’t know about all the other actors that appeared in the Toronto version.
Re: Chosen re-release in theaters. I purposely chose not to see it in theaters because the three hour runtime seemed too much for me to personally handle. (I’ve found the one hour format of streaming - and then pondering - each episode to be ideal For me, particularly when I add in the Bible roundtable on second run through, which I find fascinating)
But now nine or so hours over three days would be even more overwhelming.
Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to wait…