Is The Passion of the Christ getting TWO sequels?
"It’s not one film, it’s two films, because it’s massive," said Mel Gibson when talking about The Resurrection of the Christ recently.
Mel Gibson watchers are abuzz with the news that The Resurrection of the Christ, his long-gestating sequel to The Passion of the Christ, might be two movies, not one.
Gibson got things going while speaking to a writer from ScreenRant on a panel at Fan Expo Philadelphia last weekend. Here’s his full quote (emphasis added):
It took me about eight years to write the script for the sequel, if we can call that The Resurrection of Christ, because it’s a very complex and almost impossible to understand subject, so that necessarily you have to underpin it with a great deal of all of salvation history and theology.
It was a very difficult thing to find and synthesize, because you have to understand, firstly, why it matters… You have to think, why is mankind so important in this process? Why are the big realms of good and evil slugging it up for the hearts and minds and souls of mankind? Why us? We’re just a bunch of f***ed up things. We’re imperfect. You have to ask yourself, why are we important? Why are we making the sandwich? That whole huge story. And I think in order to understand that, you have to, you have to start with the fall of the angels in the firmament, before right at the beginning, is pretty crazy idea, what did that look like? I know what it looks like. It’s not one film, it’s two films, because it’s massive.
The idea that the sequel might be two films, not one, isn’t all that new, actually. It was apparently first hinted at by Jim Caviezel in 2023, when he told podcaster Shawn Ryan, “It will be the biggest film in history. It might be two films. Could be three, but I think it’s two.”
I can’t recall if I heard about the Caviezel quote at the time, but if I did, I might have written it off as mere hype—coming from someone who isn’t actually writing or directing the film—the same way I don’t put a lot of stock in predictions like “It will be the biggest film in history.”1
But if Gibson himself is floating the two-movie idea now, that is worth noting.
The question is, what does he mean by it?
When it was announced last week that Gibson was teaming up with Lionsgate to produce The Resurrection, it sounded like they were making just one film together: Gibson talked about “this movie”, singular, and studio chief Adam Fogelson called it “an awe-inspiring and spectacularly epic theatrical film”, singular, etc.
So a part of me is inclined to think that Gibson is speaking metaphorically now. Maybe he meant The Resurrection of the Christ is “two films” in the sense that it’s dense with material, and maybe he was referring to how the movie will jump back and forth between the Old and New Testaments, that sort of thing.
But the Caviezel quote suggests that Gibson might be planning to give The Passion of the Christ the same back-to-back sequel treatment that hit movies like The Matrix, Back to the Future, and Pirates of the Caribbean got.
Or, maybe Gibson is thinking of releasing two versions of the same film.
Two years ago, it was reported that Gibson had “two scripts” for The Resurrection, one of which was a more conventional and “very structured” kind of script, while the other was “like an acid trip” (a line he’s been using to describe the film since 2016).
I assumed at the time that Gibson was going to choose between the two scripts before he started shooting the movie, but what if he’s planning to release two different edits of the film, the same way he released a more-violent and less-violent version of The Passion (or the way Terrence Malick released two versions of Voyage of Time)?
Whatever the case, filming is expected to begin this summer, so there might be more news on this front down the road. As ever, stay tuned.
There is a precedent for this sort of overstatement: I can remember how some people claimed in 2004 that The Passion of the Christ was the biggest movie of the year, and it simply wasn’t true: in North America, The Passion made less money than Shrek 2 and Spider-Man 2, and worldwide, it was also behind Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban and The Incredibles.