Newsbites: Scorsese's Saints! Netflix's Narnia! Land of Nod! Last Supper! The Chosen!
Scorsese's docudrama series, which includes episodes about John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene, starts coming out later this month. Also: will Narnia get an IMAX release?
Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints gets a trailer
Martin Scorsese’s new Jesus movie might be on hold right now, but he’s still got some biblical material in the pipeline, thanks to Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints, a docudrama series that looks at the lives of eight Catholic saints, two of whom are major figures in the gospels.
The series, which Scorsese is hosting and narrating for Fox Nation, is being released in two segments—four episodes this year, four episodes next year—and the first segment will cover Joan of Arc (15th century), John the Baptist (1st century), Sebastian (3rd century), and Maximilian Kolbe (20th century), in that order.
The first segment starts streaming November 17, and you can watch a trailer for it here:
The second segment—which covers Mary Magdalene (1st century), Moses the Black (4th century), Thomas Becket (12th century), and Francis of Assisi (12th-13th centuries)—is supposed to “conclude in May 2025,” which could mean that it will start coming out in April, perhaps around Easter (which is on April 20 next year).
It’ll be interesting to see how this show’s depiction of John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene compares to the depiction of them in Scorsese’s first Jesus movie, 1988’s The Last Temptation of Christ. There, John was played by André Gregory (of My Dinner with Andre fame) and Mary Magdalene by Barbara Hershey (of Beaches fame).
Will the Netflix Narnia movie come to IMAX theatres?
Netflix is notoriously resistant to giving their films theatrical releases, but reports are surfacing that they might make an exception… of sorts… for the Narnia movie that Barbie director Greta Gerwig is developing for them right now.
Here’s what The Hollywood Reporter has to say:
Imax and Netflix are indeed in preliminary talks regarding Narnia, sources tell The Hollywood Reporter. One plan being discussed is to release the event pic over Thanksgiving 2026 before making it available to its subscribers over Christmas. Whether that would be a long-enough window to satisfy theater circuits that operate Imax auditoriums is the big question, and the potential stumbling block. . . .
The conversations originated after Gerwig, who directed the blockbuster 2023 movie Barbie, approached Imax. Sources say she ultimately spoke directly with Imax CEO Rich Gelfond, whose large-format screens are revered by filmmakers, including James Cameron and Christopher Nolan. . . .
Gerwig’s deal to direct Narnia was announced in early July 2023, weeks before Barbie opened at the box office and turned into a cultural phenomenon, grossing north of $1.44 billion. Her clout, needless to say, increased exponentially, and she appears eager to use that clout to bring Narnia to theaters.
The Narnia stories have been adapted for television multiple times since at least the 1960s,1 but the only big-screen adaptations so far are the three films that were made by Walden Media (two with Disney, one with Fox) between 2005 and 2010.
Incidentally, Netflix has had the Narnia movie (and TV) rights since 2018, but the streamer’s movie division is now being run by The Lego Movie producer Dan Lin, who happens to be an openly “religious” Christian. I have no idea if this will affect how the movie ends up handling the Christian themes in C.S. Lewis’s novels, but it’s fun to speculate, isn’t it?
Skinamarink director to make The Land of Nod
Speaking of speculation, I am intrigued to learn (via Variety) that Kyle Edward Ball, the Canadian director of the indie horror hit Skinamarink, has teamed up with A24 to produce a new horror movie called The Land of Nod.
Plot details are being kept under wraps, but the title comes straight from the Bible (“So Cain went out from the Lord’s presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden”; Genesis 4:16), so I cannot help but wonder what it signifies.
Is it just a metaphor—an intertextual reference, like the title to the Steinbeck novel/James Dean film East of Eden? Or is this going to be a biblical horror movie like, say, the Nicolas Cage film The Carpenter’s Son, which was recently filmed in Greece?
I have no idea, but again, it’s fun to speculate.
Pinnacle Peak preps The Last Supper for a pre-Easter release
Deadline reports that Pinnacle Peak, the Christian movie studio formerly known as Pure Flix (they sold the name, and their streaming service, to Sony in 2020), is prepping a movie called The Last Supper for a pre-Easter release in March 2025.
They’re planning to release it on 600-1,000 screens, which is fairly wide but a lot fewer than the 3,000-4,000 that a typical blockbuster gets.
(The studio is best-known for the God’s Not Dead movies, the last two of which got similarly modest releases through Fathom Events; 2021’s God’s Not Dead: We the People played for only three days, in 565 theatres at its widest, while this year’s God’s Not Dead: In God We Trust played for two weeks in up to 1,392 theatres.)
This is not the studio’s first movie with the words “The Last Supper” in the title. In 2012, they produced Apostle Peter and the Last Supper, starring Robert Loggia as Peter and Bruce Marchiano as Jesus (a role that Marchiano has played many times since the early 1990s). I reviewed that film shortly after Loggia’s death in 2015, here.
The Chosen Season 5 confirms still-vague release plans
Speaking of Bible movies getting pre-Easter theatrical releases, The Chosen creator Dallas Jenkins confirmed in his livestream last week that the show’s entire fifth season will premiere in theatres, just like the fourth season did, and he said it will all come out between “early April” and “the Easter season of 2025.”
This would seem to mean that the entire fifth season is going to come out within a two- or three-week2 timeframe (given that Easter is on April 20), which would be tighter than the month-plus roll-out that Season 4 got this year.
Jenkins said Season 5 will be released in segments, just like Season 4, but he also said viewers will have an opportunity to watch the entire season in one day.
Jenkins spent the bulk of his livestream promoting his new movie The Best Christmas Pageant Ever—which comes to theatres next week—but he also dropped an interesting hint or two about the rapidly-expanding Chosen universe, e.g. he indicated that his Moses series might have flashbacks and flashforwards, just like The Chosen.
If you missed the livestream, you can watch it here:
For those keeping track, this means we now have at least three Jesus movies coming out in the month or so before Easter next year:
The Last Supper, as per above.
The Chosen Season 5, and this will probably be multiple theatrical releases.
The King of Kings, an animated adaptation of Charles Dickens’ The Life of Our Lord.
Another animated Jesus movie, Light of the World, is also coming out next year, but that one is coming out slightly later, in the summer of 2025.
And of course, The Chosen has its own animated series, The Chosen Adventures, set to come out next year, but no details beyond that have been revealed yet3—so we don’t know yet if that show will be coming out before or after The Chosen Season 5.
C.S. Lewis’s earliest credit at the IMDb is a 1959 episode of the Canadian series Hidden Pages that was apparently based on The Magician’s Nephew—but TV Guide says the show was designed to encourage kids to read books and visit libraries, and each episode used “readings and dramatizations to bring the words to life.” It’s not clear to me whether this show’s treatment of The Magician’s Nephew would count as an adaptation of it.
The promos for the livestream said Jenkins would reveal the “release date” for Season 5, but within the livestream itself, he said he still doesn’t know which week in April the new season will start coming out.
At one point during the livestream, Jenkins said The Chosen Adventures will come out “early next year”, but then he caught himself and said, “at some point next year, I’m not exactly sure.”