Box office: A closer look at The Chosen Season 4: Episodes 1-3
Box office: A closer look at The Chosen Season 4: Episodes 1-3
The widest release, the loudest hype, the longest theatrical window... but not the biggest opening in the franchise's history.
The final box-office figures are in, and The Chosen Season 4: Episodes 1-3 came in slightly under the Sunday-morning estimates, earning $5.9 million for the three-day weekend and $7.4 million since opening on Thursday.
So, is the latest big-screen release from The Chosen a hit?
Well, it’s complicated.
To recap: The makers of The Chosen have been experimenting with theatrical releases for just over two years now.
First, they put a Christmas special with a brand-new bonus episode on the big screen in 2021. It was initially meant to be a two-day “specialty” release, but demand for tickets went so high that the release got extended indefinitely. It ended up grossing $13.7 million—a record at the time for its distributor, Fathom Events.
Then, they put the first and last episodes of Season 3 on the big screen in 2022 and 2023. The season premiere grossed $14.6 million—a new record for Fathom—while the finale, which was announced only 2½ weeks in advance and started streaming just a few days after it went to theatres, grossed about $5.3 million.
Since then, they have put out another Christmas special. It grossed only $4.6 million, but it consisted almost entirely of recycled footage from the earlier specials—so it’s actually kind of impressive that it grossed as much as it did.
And now, this month, they are releasing the entire fourth season to theatres in three installments: the first three episodes now, three more episodes a week and a half from now, and two more episodes at the very end of the month.
To promote these releases, the producers have pulled out all the stops, from holding their first-ever fan convention in October—which is where the season’s release dates were announced—to hosting teal-carpet premieres on two different continents. (I don’t know how much the Los Angeles premiere cost, but the BBC says the London premiere cost “about £1m”, or about $1.2 million in US currency.)
The first three episodes of Season 4 also got the widest release the series has ever had, at least in North America: they’re playing in a whopping 2,280 theatres.
And these episodes will probably have the longest theatrical window of any Chosen release to date. The Season 3 premiere began streaming just three weeks after it launched in theatres, and that was long by the standards of this franchise; this time, the producers have said they won’t even announce their streaming plans until Season 4 has “concluded” its theatrical run, which won’t be until mid-March.
So: The Chosen Season 4: Episodes 1-3 has the first all-new episodes since the Season 3 finale came out one year ago, it has had months of hype and promotional build-up, it’s playing in more theatres than ever, and apparently none of the episodes will be available online for at least another month and a half—so if you’re a fan, you have all the incentive in the world to try to see these episodes in a theatre, now.
Thus, the stage was set for this to be the show’s biggest theatrical hit yet.
And in the end, it… landed somewhere in the middle?
To reiterate: The Chosen Season 4: Episodes 1-3 grossed about $5.9 million for the three-day weekend and $7.4 million since opening on Thursday.
That was good enough for the #2 spot on the weekend chart, which is the highest The Chosen has ever ranked.
But it’s smaller than the opening for the Season 3 premiere, which came out on a Friday and made $8.8 million in its first three days, and it’s arguably smaller than the opening for the 2021 Christmas special, which came out on a Wednesday and made $9.1 million by the end of its first Sunday. It’s also not that much bigger than the openings for the two theatrical releases that came out in 2023.
Also: the Season 4 premiere earned between $2,606 and $3,235 per theatre (depending on whether you count Thursday’s grosses as part of the weekend figure), which is well behind the $4,340 per theatre that the Season 3 premiere opened to in 2022.
So, what accounts for the fact that the Season 4 premiere had a smaller opening than the Season 3 premiere? A few theories:
First, and most neutrally perhaps, the Season 4 premiere contains three episodes, not two, and it is over three hours long. That might reduce the number of available showtimes, and it might discourage the merely curious ticket-buyer or the more casual sort of fan.
Episodes 1-3 marks the first time ever that The Chosen announced a full two-week release in advance. All of the previous releases were initially going to last just a few days, but some of them got extensions after the original dates sold out, so those releases were arguably more front-loaded. This time, the ticket sales might be spread out more evenly, in which case this release could do as well as the Season 3 premiere when all is said and done. That’s the more optimistic scenario.
More negatively, some of the controversies around the series—such as the pride flag kerfuffle—might have turned some of the core fans away.
Or maybe word has gotten out about some of the shocking plot twists in Episodes 1-3, including the use of imagery so violent that, in the screener I saw at least, the producers added a parental-advisory title card before the third episode. Maybe parents are less likely to plan family outings to these screenings, lest they have to decide whether to leave the theatre part-way through the show.
A tiny part of me also wonders if it’s significant that The Chosen’s two biggest releases to date came out while their theatrical releases were still being handled on some level by Angel Studios. The actual distributor on all five releases has been Fathom Events, but I believe the first two releases were brokered by Angel—which, at the time, did not have a theatrical distribution unit of its own yet—and everything since the Season 3 finale has been handled directly by The Chosen, which parted ways with Angel in late 2022. Perhaps it makes a difference if the theatrical releases aren’t being promoted on the Angel platforms?
Whatever the reason, it will be interesting to see what kind of “legs” this theatrical release has.
And it will also be interesting to see what kind of audience retention the season has. That is, it will be interesting to see how the grosses for the next two installments compare to the grosses for this one. Will the numbers go up, as excitement builds for the season’s climax? Will the numbers go down, as we get closer to the inevitable streaming release date? Or will the numbers stay basically the same?
I’m particularly curious to see if The Chosen can re-claim the title of “top-grossing Fathom Events release”, which was taken late last year by The Blind, a biopic about Duck Dynasty founder Phil Robertson that grossed $17.3 million.
As ever, we shall see.
A few extra thoughts about all this:
The Chosen Season 4: Episodes 1-3 owes its #2 position on the weekend chart partly to the fact that the major studios haven’t released any new films for the past few weeks, so there’s a lack of competition right now. (Universal did distribute Argylle, the weekend’s #1 film, but that film was produced by Apple.)
Future installments of The Chosen Season 4 may face more competition:
Episodes 4-6 is coming out the weekend after Valentine’s Day, opposite the Marvel movie Madame Web and the biopic Bob Marley: One Love.
Episodes 7-8 is coming out the same week as Dune: Part Two, and one week after Lionsgate releases the “faith-based” Ordinary Angels.
Episodes 1-3 had the 15th-best opening of any Bible film in the past 26 years.
Tom Brueggeman noted that Episodes 1-3 made more money last weekend than all of the Best Picture nominees combined, if you count Thursday as part of Episodes 1-3’s weekend (as new movies often do on their opening weekends).
I suspect the box-office figures are incomplete, but as it stands, it looks like The Chosen has now grossed about $46 million in North America when you combine the revenue from all five theatrical releases.
While the season did have a premiere in London, the Box Office Mojo page for Episodes 1-3 is not yet reporting any international grosses.
One last note: I said yesterday that I was going to split this week’s box-office report in two, with one general update about the top ten, and another update—this one—about The Chosen Season 4: Episodes 1-3 specifically.
I ended up splitting the report in three, and I will be posting the third part—a simple collection of statistics spanning all five theatrical releases, which I will update as each subsequent release comes out—right after posting this installment.
I suspect that Episodes 4-6 and Episodes 7-8 won’t need this kind of context-setting, so I’ll probably just cover those releases in my regular weekly updates.
And, that about covers it for now. More later.
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The Chosen interviews:
Season 1: Dallas Jenkins, co-writer/director (Dec 2019)
Season 2: Dallas Jenkins, co-writer/director (May 2021) | Derral Eves, producer, on Christmas with The Chosen: The Messengers (Nov 2021) | Dallas Jenkins on the ‘The Chosen Is Not Good’ marketing campaign (Apr 2022)
Season 3: Jordan Walker Ross, Little James (Oct 2022) | Vanessa Benavente, Mother Mary (Nov 2022) | Kirk B.R. Woller, Gaius (Nov 2022)
The Chosen recaps:
Season 1: review | scripture index
Episode recaps: The Shepherd | one | two | three | four | five | six | seven | eightSeason 2: The Messengers review | scripture index
Episode recaps: one | two | three | four | five | six | seven | eight | The MessengersSeason 3: Episodes 1 & 2 notes | Episodes 7 & 8 notes | scripture index
Episode recaps: one | two | three | four | five | six | seven | eight