Newsbites: The Chosen! The Promised Land! The King of Kings! The Carpenter!
Newsbites: The Chosen! The Promised Land! The King of Kings! The Carpenter!
The Chosen is about to announce some new shows; The Promised Land sends out a call for extras; The King of Kings gets a distributor; and The Carpenter features a Viking orphan who works for Jesus.
The Chosen is about to announce some new “shows”
The Chosen’s second annual fan convention, aka “ChosenCon”, is taking place in Florida this week, and series creator Dallas Jenkins is going to make an announcement on Friday about the next “projects—that’s right, projects, plural” that he and his colleagues are working on. (In a video texted to the show’s fans, Jenkins said he and his team have “already started producing” some of these new shows.)
Naturally, many people assume he’ll be announcing some new Bible adaptations. In March 2023, The Chosen Inc.’s then-new president of production, Mark Sourian, hinted that the show’s creators were thinking of expanding the show’s “universe” so that they could “tell a lot of different biblical stories”. Friday’s announcement could be the first major public step in that direction. We shall see.
The announcement will be livestreamed on Friday at 5:30pm ET / 2:30pm PT:
Be an extra on the set of The Promised Land!
The makers of The Promised Land, the brand-new Office-style comedy about Moses leading the Israelites in the wilderness, are going to start shooting the rest of the first season later this month, and this week they issued a call for extras to be part of the episode that depicts the opening of the Tabernacle.
The crowd scenes will be filmed in Utah November 1-2, and fans who are interested—and willing to pay their own travel expenses—can sign up to be part of the episode here. (The producers have arranged for discounts at the local hotels, at least.)
The Promised Land has a number of ties to The Chosen—writer-director Mitch Hudson has been an assistant director on The Chosen since day one, and several of its actors are also in The Chosen—but it does not appear to be part of the Chosen “universe”; for one thing, it has different actors playing Moses and Joshua.1
But maybe it will get a shout-out at this Friday’s announcement. We’ll see.
In the meantime, it appears The Promised Land will be launching a new version of its pilot episode, with Portuguese subtitles, tomorrow. You can watch that here:
Animated King of Kings gets a distributor
The Hollywood Reporter says Blue Harbor Entertainment has acquired North American distribution rights to The King of Kings, the animated South Korean movie based on Charles Dickens’ book The Life of Our Lord.
The company, which was founded less than a year ago, plans to release the film in time for Easter, which would be in the second half of April 2025.
As reported earlier, the film’s voice cast will include Oscar Isaac as Jesus, Forest Whitaker as Peter, Ben Kingsley as Caiaphas, Mark Hamill as Herod, Pierce Brosnan as Pilate, Kenneth Branagh as Charles Dickens, Uma Thurman as Charles’s wife Catherine, and Roman Griffin Davis as Charles and Catherine’s son Walter.
A movie about Jesus and his Viking apprentice…?
Well here’s something different. I was looking around the internet for something else when I came across The Carpenter, a movie about…
Well, here’s the synopsis, straight from the film’s website:
An adopted viking orphan becomes a carpenter’s apprentice to Jesus. The orphan, Oren, fights as a side hustle. His experience training as a carpenter with Jesus as his mentor changes his lifestyle.
Wikipedia says the earliest historical reference to the Vikings comes from the 8th century, long after the time of Jesus and even long after the fall of the Roman Empire. So I highly, highly doubt there’s any historical basis for this.
It’s not even clear to me how much contact the Romans would have had with the Scandinavians in this period—though that reminds me, I interviewed Dolph Lundgren when he played a Nordic slave who works for a Roman investigating the rumours of Jesus’ resurrection in 2006’s The Final Inquiry. So this wouldn’t be the first movie to put a character from that part of the world in first-century Judea.
The filmmakers and their distributor appear to have ties to the Mormon community, so I’m curious to know if there’s some sort of tradition there that this movie might be tapping into. Or maybe the Viking thing was just made up for the film.
In any case, the film is coming to theatres November 1. This is its poster:
And this is its trailer:
P.S.: Regarding “fighting as a side hustle”, recall if you will how The Chosen introduced Simon Peter as someone who fights for money—though what he did there was nowhere near as organized as the modern-style matches that we see in this trailer.
Moses and Joshua both appeared in a flashback in The Chosen S1E7 (‘Invitations’).