Newsbites: Scorsese! Alchemist! Testament! Etc.!
Brief updates on a couple of Jesus films, a modernized book of Acts series, a sci-fi take on the book of Job, and a movie that might feature Melchizedek.
Scorsese gives an update on his Jesus movie
Martin Scorsese is making the rounds, promoting Killers of the Flower Moon, and along the way he has dropped a few more hints about that new Jesus movie he might be making. Speaking to Sight & Sound, he said:
I think I’m finally getting around to what it could be. It’s kind of a film, but it wouldn’t be a straight narrative, it wouldn’t be a documentary, it’d be a combination of things. And I think it may have to go back to Shūsaku Endō [author of the novel Silence] and his Life of Jesus [1973], which I found to be interesting because it takes Jesus as a… figure of thinking, and a question of Jesus from a point of view that’s not Western. And so I’m finding that comfortable in a way.
The reference to Endō isn’t surprising; the treatment for Scorsese’s Jesus film, which has been online since February, indicates that the film might use clips from one of the movie adaptations of Silence—presumably Scorsese’s, which came out in 2016, but it could just as easily be Masahiro Shinoda’s, which came out in 1971.
Either way, this is the first time I’ve seen Scorsese mention Endō’s Life of Jesus in connection with this project.
Nutopia producing Jesus Crown of Thorns for Fox Nation
Deadline reports that Nutopia, the production company that made the docu-series Jesus: His Life for the History Channel four years ago, is working on a new docu-drama called Jesus Crown of Thorns that will stream on Fox Nation.
Deadline says the show, which will start shooting later this year, “is intended as a franchise” that will “set Jesus’ life and mission in the context of the intense political backdrop in which he emerged as a revolutionary figure who dared challenge the status quo.”
The Alchemist gets a new writer at a new studio
The Hollywood Reporter says a movie adaptation of Paulo Coehlo’s The Alchemist is in the works… again. This version is being written by Enola Holmes’ Jack Thorne and produced by Legendary Entertainment for TriStar Pictures.
The novel “centers on a young Spanish shepherd who has a dream and embarks on a quest to find hidden treasure in the great pyramids of Egypt,” as the Hollywood Reporter puts it, and one of its key characters is Melchizedek, a “king of Salem” who is also mentioned in Genesis 14 (and a few other biblical passages).
Laurence Fishburne was attached to a film adaptation of the novel for many years—as director and/or as the actor who would play Melchizedek—and then, in 2021, it was announced that a completely different cast and director were about to start shooting the film. Apparently that version never got made, either.
If this version of the film gets made, it won’t be the first time Jack Thorne has adapted a story with a biblical tie-in; he previously oversaw the BBC/HBO adaptation of His Dark Materials, the Philip Pullman trilogy in which various figures team up to defeat the Old Testament God and his regent, the Metatron (aka Enoch).
Modernized book-of-Acts series starts shooting in January
Earlier this year, I typed up a few brief thoughts about Testament: The Parables Retold, a dramatization of the New Testament that was set in the present day.
The film, which was picked up for streaming by Angel Studios (the company behind The Chosen, Sound of Freedom, The Wingfeather Saga, and so on), is now being turned into a series—and director Paul Syrstad announced in a video this week that cameras will start rolling on the series in January 2024.
The series is billed as “a modern-day retelling of the Book of Acts. It follows a small group of believers as they seek to defy the empire and temple elite.”
The Shift tickets are now on sale
Speaking of Angel Studios, they’ve got a documentary called After Death coming to theatres next week, and then their next movie—The Shift, a multiverse movie inspired by the book of Job—is coming out December 1. Tickets for it are now on sale.
The Shift, which counts The Chosen creator Dallas Jenkins among its executive producers, stars North Shore’s Kristoffer Polaha, Yellowstone’s Neal McDonough, Star Trek: Enterprise’s John Billingsley, The Lord of the Rings’ Sean Astin, and The Chosen’s Liz Tabish, Paras Patel, and Jordan Walker Ross, among others.