The Chosen scores a box-office hit, announces new fundraising, distribution plans
The Chosen scores a box-office hit, announces new fundraising, distribution plans
With Season 3 raking in millions at the box office, the producers are partnering with a new non-profit agency to help put future seasons on stabler financial footing.
Dallas Jenkins, co-writer and director of the life-of-Jesus series The Chosen, capped a successful weekend at the box office by announcing that the series is stepping up its fundraising efforts and will probably start shooting its next season in the spring.
Jenkins made the announcement during a livestream Sunday night, at the tail end of a weekend in which The Chosen Season 3: Episodes 1 & 2 grossed an estimated $8.2 million in North American movie theatres.
Among other things, Jenkins said he and his producers are partnering with a brand new outfit called the Come and See Foundation, which will help finance the show, promote it more aggressively (Jenkins floated the possibility of a Super Bowl ad some day), and translate it into as many languages as possible around the world.
As a non-profit, the Foundation will also be able to issue tax-deductible receipts to donors. Prior to this, the show was financed through crowd-funding—a form of investment—and “pay it forward” fees. The new arrangement, said Jenkins, will allow people to make larger donations and will help to stabilize the show’s finances, so that the four remaining seasons can be produced at a steady rate of one per year.
As part of the transition to the Come and See Foundation, the show will launch a new streaming app on December 4, which will replace the existing app. The new app can currently be pre-ordered for Apple devices and is “coming soon” to Google Play.
In the livestream, Jenkins spoke to Come and See representatives Mart Green (who is on the organization’s board of directors) and Stan Jantz (the CEO).
Green is the son of Hobby Lobby founder David Green and previously produced the 2002 documentary Beyond the Gates of Splendor and the 2005 drama End of the Spear, both of which told the story of five missionaries who were martyred in Ecuador in the 1950s. (I compared and contrasted the films here.) Green also has an executive producer credit on The Lumo Project, the only complete word-for-word adaptation of all four gospels. (I interviewed the director of those films, David Batty, here.)
Jantz, for his part, sits on the board of Biola University in California and is a former executive director for the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association.
The announcement comes on the same day that The Chosen Season 3: Episodes 1 & 2 surprised a lot of people in the industry by scoring the second-biggest opening of the weekend. The movie’s estimated $8.2 million gross was enough to land it in third place overall, behind the $67.3 million that Black Panther: Wakanda Forever made in its second weekend and the $9 million that The Menu made in its first weekend.
Notably, The Chosen was playing on only 2,027 screens, compared to The Menu’s 3,211 screens, and it earned an estimated average of $4,055 per screen—which was easily the second-best average of any film in wide release except for Black Panther.
The Chosen’s achievement is particularly remarkable in light of the fact that many theatres were playing it only once or twice per day, unlike most films which get shown four or even five times per day. The Chosen also didn’t have the advantage of Thursday-night preview screenings, which usually get rolled into the Friday numbers.
The theatrical success of The Chosen Season 3 seems to have caught many reporters off-guard, though it shouldn’t have. Most box-office forecasts never even mentioned the film; instead, they focused most of their new-movie attention on The Menu and the awards contender She Said, which documents the efforts of a couple of New York Times reporters to expose Harvey Weinstein. (In the end, She Said flopped with only $2.2 million—the worst opening of any major-studio wide release this year.)
It was only after the actual Friday grosses came in that some observers began to posit that The Chosen had a shot at being the biggest new release of the week. But I had already raised this possibility when The Chosen’s release date was announced back in August. Considering how successful The Chosen’s Christmas special was last December, and considering how modest the success of 2019’s Bombshell, an earlier journalists-expose-sexual-harassment story, had been, it seemed obvious to me that The Chosen had a very good chance of beating She Said—and it did, easily.
What I didn’t know back then was that this week would see yet another wide release in the form of The Menu. Yesterday, some reporters said it looked like The Chosen would beat The Menu; today, they are saying that The Menu has pulled ahead. But these figures are all estimates, and the numbers could change again tomorrow.
In any case, The Chosen Season 3: Episodes 1 & 2 had the best opening weekend of any Bible movie since the animated Christmas movie The Star ($9.8 million in 2017)—beating the likes of Paul, Apostle of Christ (which opened to $5.2 million in 2018), Samson (which grossed $4.7 million total in 2018) and, if you count it, Redeeming Love (a quasi-modernization of Hosea that opened to $3.5 million last January).
How much higher The Chosen can go from here is anyone’s guess. The theatrical release was originally set for five days, but the distributor is open to extending it if the demand is there. Also, movies in genres or franchises with highly motivated fanbases tend to be very front-loaded; a lot of anime films and superhero movies, for example, tend to make almost half of their money in their first weekend alone.
At this point, most fans who wanted to see the film in a theatre have probably done so; the rest may be waiting for Season 3 to start streaming in December.
But the film is still out there, for now, and it does give us our first new footage of Jesus and the twelve core disciples since Season 2 concluded in July 2021. So some fans might go back for second or third viewings, just to savour the experience.
Either way, it sounds like fans won’t have to wait so long between seasons again.
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And now, for those who like numbers: Here is how The Chosen Season 3 currently ranks at the North American box office next to other Bible-themed movies that have played in theatres over the past 43 years (not adjusting for inflation):
2004 — The Passion of the Christ — $370.8 million
1998 — The Prince of Egypt — $101.4 million
2014 — Noah — $101.2 million
2014 — Exodus: Gods and Kings — $65 million
2014 — Son of God — $59.7 million
2017 — The Shack — $57.4 million
2009 — Year One — $43.3 million
2017 — The Star — $40.9 million
2006 — The Nativity Story — $37.6 million
2016 — Risen — $36.9 million
1981 — History of the World, Part I — $31.7 million
2016 — Hail, Caesar! — $30.5 million
2016 — Ben-Hur — $26.4 million
2002 — Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie — $25.6 million
1979 — Monty Python’s Life of Brian — $20 million
2018 — Paul, Apostle of Christ — $17.6 million
1980 — Wholly Moses! — $14.2 million
2021 — Christmas with The Chosen: The Messengers — $13.7 Million
2006 — One Night with the King — $13.4 million
2022 — Redeeming Love — $9.2 million
1988 — The Last Temptation of Christ — $8.4 million
2022 — The Chosen Season 3: Episodes 1 & 2 — $8.2 million
2016 — The Young Messiah — $6.5 million
1985 — King David — $5.1 million
2018 — Samson — $4.7 million
2003 — The Gospel of John — $4.1 million
2014 — The Song — $1.0 million
2007 — The Ten Commandments — $952,820
2018 — Mary Magdalene — $124,741
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The Chosen interviews:
Season 1: Dallas Jenkins, co-writer/director (Dec 2019)
Season 2: Dallas Jenkins, co-writer/director (May 2021) | Derral Eves, producer, on Christmas with The Chosen: The Messengers (Nov 2021) | Dallas Jenkins on the ‘The Chosen Is Not Good’ marketing campaign (Apr 2022)
Season 3: Jordan Walker Ross, Little James (Oct 2022) | Vanessa Benavente, Mother Mary (Nov 2022) | Kirk B.R. Woller, Gaius (Nov 2022)
The Chosen recaps:
Season 1: review | scripture index
Episode recaps: The Shepherd | one | two | three | four | five | six | seven | eightSeason 2: The Messengers review | scripture index
Episode recaps: one | two | three | four | five | six | seven | eight | The Messengers
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The Chosen can be streamed via Angel Studios or the show’s app (Android | Apple).