Newsbites: The Chosen's Joseph! Scorsese's Jesus!
Amazon, which is already distributing The Chosen itself, is now involved in the spin-off series about Joseph and his jealous brothers.
Amazon partners with The Chosen for Joseph of Egypt
Nine months ago, The Chosen creator Dallas Jenkins announced that one of the show’s first major spin-offs will be a miniseries about Joseph and his jealous brothers that will serve as a prelude to an even longer series about Moses.
Yesterday, Variety revealed that Amazon—which already has exclusive first-window streaming rights to The Chosen and recently announced theatrical plans for the show’s sixth and seventh seasons—is coming on-board to help develop the Joseph series, which is now apparently titled Joseph of Egypt.
The series is being written and executive produced by Craig Wright, who has created TV shows like ABC’s Dirty Sexy Money and OWN’s megachurch-set Greenleaf. His other writing and producing credits include Lost and Six Feet Under.
This is Joseph of Egypt’s official logline:
Betrayed by jealous brothers, Joseph defies all expectations and rises to incredible power in Egypt, second only to Pharaoh. But when his past catches up with him, he is confronted with the ultimate test.
Variety doesn’t have many other details about the show, but when Jenkins first announced it last September, he said it would be eight episodes long and would come out before Season 7 of The Chosen. Given The Chosen’s current release schedule, that would seem to mean Joseph of Egypt will be out before March 2028.
Amazon, of course, has other, non-Chosen-related biblical stuff in the works, too. Season 1 of House of David finished streaming on Prime Video last April, and Season 2 has already started filming (and may have even wrapped by now).
Amazon Studios has also been developing an adaptation of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat with Wicked director Jon M. Chu for the past two years. It hasn’t got the green light yet, but it would be interesting if Amazon ended up making two presumably very different versions of the Joseph story at the same time.
Incidentally, Joseph of Egypt writer/producer Craig Wright already has a Bible-movie credit, of sorts, under his belt: he was one of the writers on 2014’s Mr. Peabody & Sherman, which features a brief glimpse of the baby Moses floating in a basket in the Nile during a time-travel montage. (That makes MP&S one of two DreamWorks cartoons that have depicted Moses, following 1998’s The Prince of Egypt.)
Re: Joseph movies, I’ve written quite a bit about them in the past, including reviews of:
The Bible Collection: Joseph (an Emmy winner for outstanding miniseries; 1995)
Joseph, King of Dreams (a sort of prequel to The Prince of Egypt; 2000)
God’s Stories: Joseph (an Arabic movie; 2004)
Prophet Joseph (a 45-episode Iranian TV series; 2008-2009)
I also interviewed director Roger Young about his work on The Red Tent (2014), a miniseries about Joseph’s sister Dinah that touches on Joseph’s story; and I wrote about Joseph movies—as well as movies about Joseph’s ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—in an essay on movies about the Genesis patriarchs for The Bible in Motion: A Handbook of the Bible and Its Reception in Film (De Gruyter, 2016).
Update: In a livestream a few hours after I wrote this post, Jenkins said the Joseph miniseries will be filmed “this fall and into the winter”.
Scorsese might shoot his Jesus movie in black-and-white
Martin Scorsese is still working on his Jesus movie.
La Gazzetta Del Mezzogiorno reports that Scorsese had this to say while he was at the Taormina Film Fest in Sicily last week (translated from Italian via Google):
Scorsese then returns to talk about the film about the life of Jesus: "I am still working on it, because I would like to give a more contemporary approach to the project - he says. But he anticipates that "almost certainly it will be a black and white film". Scorsese admits that he has thought of a film of this kind since the Sixties, in the meantime "I saw many films concerning the Gospel, for example that of the Gospel According to Matthew", but it takes time for "I like that a work of this kind is something that requires so many years of study and research".
Scorsese has said most of this before, but unless I’m forgetting something, the bit about the film being black-and-white is new to me. Given how black-and-white footage is often associated with “old” movies, it’s striking that he would consider shooting the film this way while simultaneously pursuing “a more contemporary approach” to the subject. Then again, a lot of movies and music videos are made in black-and-white for stylistic reasons these days, so maybe it is kind of contemporary.1
It remains to be seen whether Scorsese will actually make this film. Either way, he’s definitely got more biblical “content” on the way; it was recently announced that a second season of Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints is coming in November, and it seems that as many as half of the show’s eight new episodes—about Mary, Peter, Paul, and Longinus—will be at least partly based on the New Testament.
Upcoming Bible movies and TV shows:
now-June 29, 2025 — The Chosen: Season 5 (streaming: Prime Video - US only)
June 18, 2025 — The Chosen: Season 5: Episode 3 (streaming: YouTube)
now-July 21, 2025 — Testament: Season 1 (streaming: Angel Studios, with episodes streaming on YouTube and Facebook one week after their Angel debut)
July 13-27, 2025 — The Chosen: Season 5 (streaming: Prime Video - international)
September 5, 2025 — Light of the World (theatrical: Salvation Poem Project)
November 2025 — Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints: Season 2 part 1 (streaming: Fox Nation)
December 19, 2025 — Zero A.D. (theatrical: Angel Studios)
2025 (no month specified) — The Carpenter’s Son (theatrical: Magnolia)
2025 (no month specified) — The Chosen Adventures (streaming)
2025 (no month specified) — The Promised Land: Season 1 (streaming)
2025 (no month specified) — R&B (streaming: Netflix)
Spring 2026 — The Faithful (television: Fox)
April-May 2026 — Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints: Season 2 part 2 (streaming: Fox Nation)
second half of 2026 — The Chosen: Season 6: Episodes 1-6 (streaming: Prime Video)
March 12, 2027 — The Chosen: Season 6: Finale (theatrical: Amazon MGM)
March 31, 2028 — The Chosen: Season 7: Premiere (theatrical: Amazon MGM)
no release date specified — David (theatrical)
no release date specified — House of David: Season 2 (streaming: Prime Video)
no release date specified — Jacob (theatrical: Angel Studios)
no release date specified — Joseph of Egypt (streaming: Prime Video)
no release date specified — Judas’ Gospel (theatrical…?)
no release date specified — The Resurrection of the Christ (theatrical: Lionsgate)
who knows when Malick will finish it — The Way of the Wind (theatrical)
How many movies about Jesus have actually been made in black-and-white, I wonder? Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), certainly. Maybe a few films in the 1930s, like The Last Days of Pompeii (1935). But many, if not most, of the even older silent-era films had at least some colour, via tints and stencils, and the 1920s versions of Ben-Hur (1925) and The King of Kings (1927) had entire sequences in two-strip Technicolor.