Newsbites: The Promised Land! Animated David! The Carpenter's Son! House of David!
The Promised Land comes to Angel; the animated David releases a new clip; Nicolas Cage gives his side of the "bees" story on The Carpenter's Son; and Jon Erwin talks AI VFX in House of David.
The Promised Land comes to Angel
The Promised Land, a mockumentary sitcom about Moses leading the Israelites that premiered on YouTube last month, now has a second streaming home—on the Angel Studios platform, where it joins other biblical films and shows like Testament, Young David, and His Only Son.
The series remains available to the public on YouTube, but the filmmakers are taking part in some exclusive bonus content for Angel, starting with a livestream on the Angel app and Facebook account that will take place today at 4pm PT / 7pm ET. (If it becomes available on YouTube too, I will add it to this post.)
The filmmakers are also still posting new videos on their YouTube channel. Yesterday they released a 2½-minute featurette on the show’s female characters, focusing primarily on Moses’ sister Miriam (Shereen Khan) and his wife Zipporah (Tryphena Wade):
For more info on the show’s approach to the female characters, and on Khan’s approach to Miriam in particular, see my interview with Khan from a few weeks ago. Here, for example, she talks about how she got some big clues to the character from the very few references to her in the Bible:
And with Miriam though, it is sparse, but we know that she starts off a child of deep faith, that she’s a prophetess, and that she’s given a connection with God right away. And so that really tells me a lot about her character, that she follows Moses as a baby up the river, that she brokers his safety with the Egyptian princess, that she brings in her mother and keeps the family together, her connection to family for that reason, and, you know, she’s savvy. She’s scrupulous. From a very young age, all of these things, you can extrapolate, “Well, if this, then that,” and then how her intelligence and those scruples later on gets her in trouble.
Angel has also released its own version of the show’s trailer, which is basically identical to the original trailer except for the title cards at the end:
One last note: I wrote an article about the series for Christianity Today, which the folks behind The Promised Land were kind enough to link to in their latest e-mail to the fans. (I quote: “And lest we forget: thou shalt read this article from Christianity Today. Thanks for covering The Promised Land!” You’re welcome, and thanks back atcha.)
Previous videos for The Promised Land:
The ‘Behind the Scenes: Day 5’ and ‘Sizzle Reel’ videos (June 1, 2024)
The pilot trailer and the ‘Get to Know Moses’ and ‘Who is Moses? Mitch Hudson Explains’ videos (June 22, 2024)
The post-pilot livestream video (July 12, 2024)
The post-announcement Q&A (August 15, 2024)
The Portuguese-subtitled pilot episode (September 18, 2024)
The first podcast episode (July 26, 2025)
The sneak peek of the first-look trailer (August 22, 2025)
The first-look trailer (September 3, 2025)
The official trailer (September 19, 2025)
The season finale watch party (November 7, 2025)
See also my interviews with series creator Mitch Hudson and co-star Shereen Khan.
David (and others!) soothe Saul in a new clip from David
In other Angel-related Bible-movie news, the studio released another clip from their upcoming animated movie David this week. This one shows David—and others!—soothing King Saul with a song called ‘Shalom’. You can watch it above.
With the release of this video, the only songs from the soundtrack album that haven’t been released as movie clips yet are the reprises of ‘I Will Not Be Afraid’ and ‘Follow the Light’, plus the end-credits song ‘Psalm 8’ by Phil Wickham.
The film comes to theatres December 19.
Previous videos for David:
The demo video (October 24, 2021)
A one-minute clip (August 31, 2025; starts at the 55:53 mark)
The ‘Follow the Light’ clip (October 9, 2025)
The pay-it-forward announcement with new footage (October 15, 2025)
The ‘Samuel’s Blessing’ clip (October 16, 2025)
The teaser and the ‘Tapestry’ clip (October 23, 2025)
The ‘Why God - My God’ clip (October 24, 2025)
The ‘I Will Not Be Afraid’ clip (October 30, 2025)
The ‘Adventure Song’ clip (November 5, 2025)
The ‘Victory Song’ clip (November 7, 2025)
Plus see my posts on the Young David series: episodes one, two, three, four, five.
More details on the bee (or wasp) attack on The Carpenter’s Son
Last year a swarm of bees interrupted filming on The Carpenter’s Son. Now, with the movie itself about to come out, Entertainment Weekly got a few more details about that incident, with Cage blaming “stupid location scouting, and someone didn’t do their research”:
“The bees there, by the way, are protected. I would be pissed off too, if I was a bee and there was a film crew going into my hive and shining lights on everything,” he jokes. “It was ridiculous. I don’t know whose idea it was. And then they kept saying, ‘Go back and shoot there with all the bees,’ and people were getting stung and getting sick. I mean, it was really not smart.
Cage emphasizes again that “it wasn’t any kind of divine mystical intervention. It was just stupidity. There was no regard for nature and our brothers and sisters in the animal kingdom.”
Interestingly, a statement from director Lotfy Nathan indicates that the offended insects may have been wasps, rather than bees:
“Around the middle of production, we showed up for our first day at a new location, a remote mountain top where a set for a leper colony was constructed. Apparently, some chemical the art department used for finishing touches on the set ended up attracting a swarm of wasps overnight, which no one noticed until the morning we were set to shoot there.”
Regarding how the filmmakers approached the movie’s controversial subject matter—it’s a horror movie about dark forces trying to drive a wedge between the teenaged Jesus (Noah Jupe) and his adoptive father Joseph (Cage)—Cage said:
“I can tell you that everybody approached this movie as though the material was something sacred, and they were very careful with it. There was no wink, there was no smirk. It was emotionally raw; it was vulnerable. It was naked, in terms of vulnerability and emotion. That could be a risk in itself. People may be uncomfortable with that, but I think that if you go to the movie, you will see that it was sincere storytelling.”
The film comes to theatres in the US tomorrow, November 14.
House of David creator Jon Erwin on the show’s use of AI
Artificial Intelligence remains controversial in Hollywood, but one filmmaker who’s openly embracing it is House of David creator Jon Erwin.
Erwin released a short video when Season 1 came out, explaining how he used AI to depict the fallen angels and the origin of the giants, and now he’s talking about how he used AI even more in Season 2 of the series.
Wired posted an interview with Erwin under the headline ‘Amazon’s House of David Used Over 350 AI Shots in Season 2. Its Creator Isn’t Sorry’. The article is behind a paywall, but here is part of how The Wrap summarized it:
Amazon Prime Video and the Wonder Project’s “House of David” Season 2 features between 350 and 400 AI-generated images, and showrunner Jon Erwin has advocated for more Hollywood creatives to publicly embrace the technology.
In an interview with Wired published Monday, Erwin said he did not have the budget to practically bring some of the battle sequences, locations and environments in “House of David” Season 2 to life, so he used AI. Erwin’s faith-based production company, the Wonder Project, noted that the behind-the-scenes use of AI in “House of David” increased exponentially between its first season, which purportedly used around 70 AI images, and the show’s second.
“The cost of augmenting those shots is minuscule compared to the time and cost it would have been to generate those with, you know, traditional VFX methods,” Erwin explained. The “House of David” creator went on to compare his use of AI in the Prime Video series to puppeteering. . . .
“What makes it scary for some people and really exciting for others is I’ve never seen technology iterate and evolve this quickly,” Erwin argued. “This is a fundamental change that’s going to happen no matter what your opinion is, and these tools are going to be the basis of a lot of work moving forward.”
For what it’s worth, I asked Erwin about the show’s use of AI when I interviewed him myself last month, though that part of the interview didn’t end up in the article I wrote. Here is part of what he said:
It’s a huge part of our process now, and I would say that it’s still in the category of visual effects, but there’s just a bunch of new tools that allow us to dream bigger and manifest our creativity in a larger scale, and I love that we’re kind of leading in this way with House of David.
The dream of House of David was always to do this epic show on a budget that everyone told us was impossible, and so we have this thing that we say—“We don’t compromise, we innovate,”—and so it was great to be sort of on the bleeding edge of using generative AI as a part of our visual effects process, and then combining it with all the traditional ways we do VFX, and combining it with principal photography, and I felt that we should just be open about our use of these tools because I believe in them, and I believe they’re going to allow epic scope and scale to be accessible and democratized to many filmmakers that would not be able to tell stories that big, and I think it’s going to be very good for our industry.
I think it’s going to create a lot of jobs because it’s going to give a lot of green lights to things that would have been otherwise impossible to make, and I find that for myself as a creative, when you learn to harness these tools and pull them into your process, you can tether directly to your imagination in a pretty profound way, and it amplifies creativity at every level. It does not replace artistry at all, it amplifies it.
And so at House of David, it’s about three times the use of the technology, and it’s many of the shots that we just otherwise could not have afforded, but they’re all based off the— We do everything we can for real, and the show is a location-based show—it takes 600 people to make the show—but in episode 201, for instance, that battle had 100,000 people in it, and so that was just beyond the scope or technical capabilities of the show. And so AI became a huge tool in our VFX process, and I think it’s going to be a game-changing tool in the industry, and I’m grateful to be among the first to use it and to lead in that way.
The final episode of House of David Season 2 starts streaming on the Wonder Project channel on Prime Video in the US this Sunday, November 16. (The season will be available on Prime Video globally at a later date, which has yet to be announced.)
Upcoming Bible movies and TV shows:
now-November 16, 2025 — House of David: Season 2 (streaming: Prime Video - Wonder Project)
November 14, 2025 — The Carpenter’s Son (theatrical: Magnolia)
November 16-December 7, 2025 — Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints: Season 2 part 1 (streaming: Fox Nation; St Peter episode November 23, 2025)
December 6, 2025 — The Solomon Saga (streaming: YouTube)
December 19, 2025 — David (theatrical: Angel Studios)
March 22-April 5, 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)
sometime in 2026 — Zero A.D. (theatrical: Angel Studios)
March 12, 2027 — The Chosen: Season 6: Finale (theatrical: Amazon MGM)
March 26, 2027 — The Resurrection of the Christ: Part One (theatrical: Lionsgate)
May 6, 2027 — The Resurrection of the Christ: Part Two (theatrical: Lionsgate)
March 31, 2028 — The Chosen: Season 7: Premiere (theatrical: Amazon MGM)
no release date specified — Jacob (theatrical: Angel Studios)
no release date specified — Joseph of Egypt (streaming: Prime Video)
no release date specified — The Promised Land: Season 2 (streaming)
who knows when Malick will finish it — The Way of the Wind (theatrical)