Newsbites: Malick! Scorsese! Chosen! Cabrini!
Newsbites: Malick! Scorsese! Chosen! Cabrini!
The Way of the Wind targets a 2025 release, Scorsese produces a series about The Saints, The Chosen starts filming Season 5 in less than two weeks, and more.
Time for another quick round-up of news items. But first, a few quick notes about the past week’s key release dates and/or anniversaries:
Tuesday March 26 — The Book of Clarence came to Blu-ray and DVD, and apparently there has been some confusion as to whether the disc comes with a code for a digital copy (and, if so, which digital vendor can redeem the code).
Wednesday March 27 — Testament: The Story of Moses came to Netflix. I have not had a chance to write about it yet, but I hope to, soon-ish.
Thursday March 28 — The 10th birthday of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah. I was too busy to write something special for the occasion, but you can find all the blog posts that I wrote about the film during its initial release via this tag, and you can see some of my newer posts about the film here and here. (Yes, I need to un-pause that line-by-line commentary that I started last year. Soon, soon…)
And now, for the news items.
The Way of the Wind co-star shares new story details
The Film Stage says Terrence Malick’s Jesus movie The Way of the Wind—which was filmed in 2019 and has been in the editing room ever since—is now aiming to be ready for a 2025 premiere, possibly at Cannes.
The site also says actor Géza Röhrig, who plays Jesus in the film, recently revealed some details about the film while speaking at a university:
Wind will not exactly focus on Jesus and Peter (as played by Matthias Schoenaerts), but rather the main crux is Peter wanting Jesus to become politically involved in stopping Roman oppression and Jesus not believing he should. Röhrig also confirmed Jesus won’t perform any miracles in the film, making for a rather grounded approach. He also mentioned Malick first hoped to make the film in the 1990s with Disney and a large budget, but he departed the project when the studio wouldn’t give him the final cut; he then embarked on The Thin Red Line.
The last time we got an update on this film, it was going to be in the “final stages of mixing” sometime in August. If the film does come out next year, it will mean the film spent five or six years in post-production—a new record for Malick, who previously spent four and a half years editing Song to Song between 2012 and 2017.
Scorsese now working on Jesus and The Saints at the same time!
Martin Scorsese has been talking about making a new Jesus movie for about a year. Now Variety reports that he’s working on a series about Catholic saints, too—and two of the featured saints will come straight from the gospels:
The docudrama will premiere [on Fox Nation] in two parts, with the first four episodes set to release on Nov. 16 and the final set to conclude in May 2025. Each episode focuses on a singular saint, including Joan of Arc, Francis of Assisi, John the Baptist, Thomas Becket, Mary Magdalene, Moses the Black, Sebastian and Maximillian Kolbe.
If, like me, you prefer to see that list of names in chronological order, here it is:
John the Baptist — 1st century; died during Jesus’ ministry
Mary Magdalene — 1st century; original follower of Jesus
Sebastian — c. 255-288
Moses the Black — c. 330-405
Thomas Becket — c. 1119-1170
Francis of Assisi — c. 1181-1226
Joan of Arc — c. 1412-1431
Maximilian Kolbe — 1894-1941
This is not Fox Nation’s first foray into the history of Christianity; they also have a docuseries about Jesus in the works, called Jesus Crown of Thorns.
This is also not the first time we’ve heard about Scorsese working on a series with at least some sort of biblical connection. Paul Schrader, who has written several films for Scorsese including 1988’s The Last Temptation of Christ, claimed in 2021 that he and Scorsese were developing a streaming series called The Apostles and Apocrypha, but I haven’t heard anything about that project since that interview.
As for the new Jesus movie, Variety posted an interview this week with Fr Antonio Spadaro, the Jesuit priest who took part in the press conference where Scorsese announced that film last May; Spadaro has just published a collection of interviews with Scorsese in Italy called Dialoghi sulla fede or Dialogues on Faith.
Attached to the interview is an excerpt from an early draft of Scorsese’s script. A lot of news sites have reacted to this excerpt as though it were completely new, but it’s basically identical to the treatment that was posted to the La Civiltà Cattolica website way, way back in February 2023 (which I first linked to in June 2023).
That being said, the two versions do have some slightly different word choices—one says “superfluous” while the other says “redundant”, etc.—which leads me to wonder if either version was translated from English to Italian and back again.
The Chosen Season 5 starts filming in twelve days… but when will Season 4 start streaming?
Variety reports that The Chosen will start shooting Season 5 on April 11. The series will film in Utah for six weeks, before going back to its “home base” in Texas.
An excerpt:
[Series creator Dallas] Jenkins added that he’s most excited to get to work on the set for the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus gets betrayed and arrested. “No one’s ever seen what we’ve got planned for that sequence,” he said.
Remarkably, the Variety story says nothing about the “legal matters” that are holding up the streaming release of Season 4; the trade paper doesn’t even mention that the season’s streaming release has been delayed. All it says on that front is this:
Young [i.e. Kyle Young, the executive vice-president of distribution and marketing for The Chosen] said there’s no timetable yet for when Season 4 might premiere on broadcast and streaming. And beyond that, he says “The Chosen” team is exploring whether to switch to making “The Chosen” exclusive to one outlet.
Far be it from me to speculate about what’s going on behind the scenes, but I do note that, according to certain public documents, The Chosen tried to terminate its agreement with the show’s original production partner Angel Studios in April 2023, and Angel posted a statement seven weeks later asserting that they still had “global exclusive rights” to the show that allowed them to stream new episodes in tandem with The Chosen’s in-house app during the episodes’ first post-theatrical window.
Basically, according to the Angel Studios statement, the release pattern is supposed to go like so:
The Chosen can handle its own theatrical releases;
then The Chosen and Angel Studios can start streaming each new episode together—and nobody else can stream it during that first post-theatrical window;
and then, at some point after that, The Chosen can sub-license existing episodes to other networks and streaming services.
It would appear that Season 4 is currently stuck between those first two phases, while the powers that be await “arbitration of the matter”.
In the meantime, The Chosen Season 4 can still be shown theatrically—it returned to theatres this weekend—and the first four episodes are currently available for “free promotional screenings” in churches. They just can’t start streaming yet.
Cabrini director Alejandro Monteverde teases new movie
Deadline posted an interview with Cabrini director Alejandro Monteverde a few weeks back in which he, again, resisted the idea that his films—including, yes, the one about the nun who became a Catholic saint—are “faith-based”:
DEADLINE: Your work is often called faith-based. What are your thoughts on that label?
MONTEVERDE: For me, it’s very painful. Not because of the faith-based label, it’s any label. Labels are designed to exclude, period. So the minute you label something, you’re split into another audience. I have always been fighting against labels. What is the upside of a label? Like, why label? Why not just call it a movie? And why do some projects get labeled and some don’t? I like to make movies for everybody — for people of faith, for people of no faith, and the people in between. And I like to make movies that propose questions, to open up a social dialogue. So yes, I don’t understand why they need to label my work. I take it personally. My films constantly have that label. I hope one day it’s just a movie.
He then goes on to say this about his next film, which he’s currently developing:
MONTEVERDE: I’m working on a movie about another woman, a very, very powerful woman, if not the most well-known woman who ever walked this earth. I am currently working on that project to be shot in Malta. I’m very excited about that film. It continues the journey of celebrating the power of the woman’s voice, which is a beautiful because, when I read Cabrini, I though this is an opportunity to celebrate the power of the heart of woman. And this is a perfect film to celebrate that. For the new film, people’s awareness of who she is is the opposite of Cabrini in many ways. Because nobody knew who Cabrini was, and everybody knows who she is. It’s a project that’s been on the works for many, many years.
“The most well-known woman who ever walked this earth”? Ordinarily, I would say that that’s the Virgin Mary—and the fact that this film is going to be shot in Malta, where films like Risen and Paul, Apostle of Christ were made, only makes me more inclined to think that he’s working on some sort of biblical project.
But “a very, very powerful woman”? In earthly terms, no, I wouldn’t expect the Virgin Mary to be described that way; she was a humble peasant girl, etc. And it would be… odd… if a filmmaker who was trying to distance himself from the “faith-based” label tackled an explicitly biblical subject in his next film.
So I have no idea who he’s talking about. Anyone want to guess?