Box office: Jesus films take three slots in the top ten for the first time ever

The animated The King of Kings had one of the four best openings of any "faith-based" movie ever, while The Chosen: Last Supper is now the highest-grossing group of releases in the series' history.

Jesus (voiced by Oscar Isaac) in The King of Kings.

History was made this weekend, as movies about Jesus took three of the top ten slots at the box office for the first time since wide theatrical releases and weekly box-office reporting became standard across the industry roughly half a century ago.

The King of Kings—an animated rendering of the life of Jesus produced by a South Korean visual-effects studio and inspired by Charles Dickens’ The Life of Our Lord—was the top new movie of the week (and #2 overall, behind A Minecraft Movie), with an estimated $19.1 million since opening on Thursday.

This was the best first weekend of any faith-based film in over a decade, and easily the second-best opening for the film’s distributor Angel Studios, behind 2023’s Sound of Freedom. In fact, The King of Kings has already outgrossed most of Angel’s other films, and it will be their second-biggest movie ever in just a day or two.

Meanwhile, The Chosen: Last Supper—which released its third and final instalment this week—claimed two of the other spots in the top ten. Part three grossed an estimated $5.8 million (the best opening of any of The Chosen’s season finales) and landed at #6, while Part two added just under $1 million to its coffers in its second week (raising its ten-day cume to almost $11 million) and landed at #10.

Several other significant milestones were hit this week:

• The King of Kings had the best opening weekend of any animated Bible movie, beating the $14.5 that The Prince of Egypt opened to in 1998 (though it would certainly fall behind that film once you adjust for 27 years of inflation).

• Between The King of Kings and The Chosen: Last Supper part three, this was the first time ever that two movies about Jesus, or indeed two Bible movies of any sort, opened in thousands of theatres across North America on the same day.

• Depending on which movies you count, this was also just the third or fourth time that two or more Jesus movies were in the top ten at the same time.

  • Last week — the first two parts of The Chosen: Last Supper were #3 and #7.

  • March 11-13, 2016 — The Young Messiah opened at #7 while Risen was #10 in its fourth week.

  • February 19-21, 2016 — Risen opened at #3 while Hail, Caesar!—a movie about the making of a Bible movie—was #10 in its third week.

• Between The King of Kings, The Chosen: Last Supper, and another film called The Last Supper—released by Pinnacle Peak in March—this was the fifth week in a row with at least one Jesus movie in the top ten.

  • The only comparable streak that I can think of happened last year, when The Chosen: Season 4—released in three instalments like The Chosen: Last Supper—was in the top ten for six weeks. (Season 4’s three parts were released at two-week intervals, rather than the one-week intervals for Last Supper.)

• The three instalments of The Chosen: Last Supper—also known as The Chosen: Season 5—have now grossed just over $36 million combined, which makes this the highest-grossing season of the series so far.

  • Season 4 grossed $31.6 million in 2024.

  • Season 3—which released only its two-episode premiere and two-episode finale in theatres—grossed $20.1 million in 2022 and 2023.

  • Including the two Christmas specials in 2021 and 2023, The Chosen franchise as a whole has now grossed over $106 million.

There have been other times when multiple Jesus movies played in theatres at the same time—particularly, one assumes, during the Bible-movie heyday of the 1950s and 1960s. But release patterns were different back then, and box-office reporting was based on certain key cities and not on national data. So it’s impossible to compare this weekend’s box-office stats to any given weekend back then.

Notably, there were three major musicals about Jesus in 1973: Godspell premiered on March 21, and Johnny Cash’s Gospel Road: A Story of Jesus premiered just ten days later, so those two films presumably overlapped to some degree. Jesus Christ Superstar premiered four and a half months later, on August 15.

Also, in 1979, John Heyman—producer of Campus Crusade’s Jesus film (and father of Harry Potter producer David Heyman)—openly complained that Warner Brothers was distributing his movie and Monty Python’s Jesus-movie spoof Life of Brian at the same time, sometimes in neighbouring theatres.¹ But Box Office Mojo doesn’t have any weekly data for either of those films.

It will be interesting to see what kind of “legs” the current Jesus films have. Next Sunday is Easter—and this is one of the special years when Eastern and Western churches celebrate Easter (or Pascha, as it’s called in the east) at the same time—so one assumes these films will get a boost then. Beyond that, who knows?²

And now, a few more stats and facts re: this week’s top ten, title by title: