Rumour: Mel Gibson's sequel to The Passion might start shooting this spring

Gibson first revealed his plans for The Resurrection back in 2016.

Just a heads-up: Jordan Ruimy at the World of Reel blog passed along a rumour last week to the effect that Mel Gibson will finally start shooting his sequel to The Passion of the Christ this year, possibly in the late spring.

There’s not much more to the rumour than that, beyond what we already knew:

• The film will be called The Resurrection, or some variant thereof.

• It will focus on the period between the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. (In 2016, while promoting Hacksaw Ridge, Gibson told Stephen Colbert the film might take place partly in “another realm” as Jesus descends into Hell.)

• Gibson has been developing the script with Randall Wallace, his co-writer on Braveheart and his director on We Were Soldiers. (As of October 2020, the script had gone through three or five drafts, but Ruimy says it’s up to six, now.)

• Jim Caviezel will return in the role of Jesus himself.

As you might recall, The Passion of the Christ was a big, big deal when it came out in theatres back in February 2004. It grossed $370.3 million in North America and $611.5 million worldwide—unheard of for a February release back then—and it was one of the top-grossing R-rated, foreign-language, and independent films of all time.

The success of that film sparked a surge of interest in “faith-based” films, with studios like Sony and 20th Century Fox setting up entire divisions dedicated to the “faith-based” market. And because The Passion focused almost exclusively on the torture and execution of Jesus, it spawned a number of imitators and would-be successors that tried to carry the story forward to the Resurrection and beyond, such as:

• The Final Inquiry (2006), which brought back Hristo Shopov as Pontius Pilate, in a story about a Roman who investigates rumours of the Resurrection.

• The Bible (2013), which clearly followed The Passion’s template in its treatment of the Crucifixion, but went on to depict the Resurrection and the early Church.

• A.D. The Bible Continues (2015), which was not only a follow-up of sorts to The Bible but was eventually re-edited into a feature film called Resurrection in 2021.

• Risen (2016), which is about a Roman who investigates the disappearance of Jesus’ body and was explicitly advertised as an unofficial sequel to The Passion.

It was shortly after the release of that last film that Gibson and Wallace revealed they were working on a script for their own sequel to The Passion of the Christ.

In the almost six and a half years since then, we’ve heard occasional rumours that the project was still in development—usually via Caviezel—but nothing concrete.

This latest rumour doesn’t change that. We don’t know if any other actors have been hired, or if any production offices have been set up, etc., etc. And even if the rumour is true, plans can change. So, let’s not get our hopes up too much yet.

In the meantime, the way people keep talking about the pre-production on this film is beginning to remind me of the interminable post-production on another Jesus movie, i.e. Terrence Malick’s The Way of the Wind, which was shot way back in 2019.

Hey, there’s an idea for a poll:

Just for the record, if Substack’s poll feature allowed a longer character count, I would have put it more like this: “Which movie will be finished first: the Mel Gibson Jesus movie that hasn’t been filmed yet, or the Terrence Malick Jesus film that has?”

Hmmm, here’s another idea for a poll:

As ever, we shall see.

P.S.: Films like these can take a long time to develop. Risen, which finally came out in 2016, was first announced in 2007. I talked to the producers about that here.

P.P.S.: I wrote a lot of articles and essays about The Passion of the Christ in the years surrounding its release, and I rounded up some of those items here, in a blog post that I wrote a few weeks before the film’s 10th anniversary in February 2014.