Newsbites: Chosen! Materials! Testament! Revolution!
Newsbites: Chosen! Materials! Testament! Revolution!
Release dates and/or videos for The Chosen, His Dark Materials, Testament, and Jesus Revolution.
Things have been a little slow at Thoughts & Spoilers lately. Sorry about that. Chalk it up to a combination of part-time job, film-festival going, and other things. In the meantime, here are a few quick newsy items that came up this week.
The Chosen drops a few hints about its Season 3 release plan
We’ve known since August that the first two episodes of The Chosen’s third season will be coming to movie theatres November 18, but what about the rest of the season? Now, we have an answer—or at least a partial answer. Last Tuesday, director Dallas Jenkins announced on his Facebook page that, after the theatrical release, he and his team will “launch the whole season weekly on the apps in December.” So it sounds like Season 3 will come out at a more regular pace than Season 2, where it sometimes took as long as an entire month for a new episode to come out. But will all eight episodes be coming out in December—perhaps at a two-per-week pace (à la how Amazon released Outer Range)? That could be handy for viewers who want to binge-watch the season over Christmas break. Or will they only start releasing the season in December, with the finale coming out in January or maybe even February?
His Dark Materials to release Season 3 in December
Speaking of third seasons coming out in December, HBO revealed yesterday that they will be releasing the third season of His Dark Materials that month—at a pace of two episodes per week, as it happens, with two episodes coming out every Monday between the 5th and 26th of the month. The third season is, naturally enough, based on the third book in Philip Pullman’s trilogy (i.e. The Amber Spyglass), and if it stays true to the book, it will depict the death of the Old Testament God, the liberation of souls from the afterlife (i.e. the souls of the dead will get to disintegrate spiritually, the same way dead bodies disintegrate physically when they decompose), and a scene in which an ex-nun teaches the young protagonists that Christianity is a big, big mistake. I wrote a lot about Pullman’s trilogy back in the day, and you can find links to a lot of those articles and blog posts here. Among other things, I interviewed Pullman himself by e-mail for Christianity Today when the movie version of The Golden Compass came out in 2007. You can watch a teaser for the upcoming season here:
Testament: The Parables Retold premieres on the Angel app
I mentioned back in July that Angel Studios, the outfit behind The Chosen, was now raising money for a series called Testament that would tell a modern-day version of the book of Acts. I mentioned at the time that the individuals who have partnered with Angel for the series had already produced a feature-length film based on the concept, and that the film would premiere later this year. Well, that premiere happened two days ago, on Thursday. I have been too busy to watch the film myself so far, but in the meantime, you can check it out for yourself on the Angel app or via YouTube:
A new featurette gives us our first look at Jesus Revolution
We’ve seen photos and a poster for Jesus Revolution, the upcoming movie about the hippie Jesus movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, but this week we got our first bit of actual footage, via a featurette called ‘The Heart Of’. (Curiously, the official name of the clip on YouTube does not complete that phrase by calling it ‘The Heart of Jesus Revolution’ or anything like that.) The film, which comes out in February 2023, stars Kelsey Grammer as Pastor Chuck Smith, Joel Courtney as Greg Laurie, and Jonathan Roumie as Lonnie Frisbee. (Interestingly, while Frisbee sometimes compared himself to Jesus—given his appearance and his apparent ability to perform miracles—Roumie, who is best-known for playing Jesus in The Chosen, recently called Frisbee a “John the Baptist” figure, which hints at how the movie might be making allowances for Frisbee’s fallibility and putting some distance between Roumie-as-Frisbee and Roumie-as-Jesus. Typologically, it also suggests that the film will portray Frisbee as someone who had to become lesser so that someone else—Smith? Laurie?—could become greater.) You can watch the four-minute featurette here: