The Chosen: Season 3 is coming to theatres November 18
The Chosen: Season 3 is coming to theatres November 18
A few quick thoughts on the first two episodes' box-office potential.
Dallas Jenkins, co-writer and director of The Chosen, announced in a livestream tonight that the first two episodes of Season 3 will be coming to theatres November 18. He had mentioned in the past that there were plans to give the season a theatrical premiere, but this, I think, was the first time he gave the premiere a specific date.
A few quick thoughts about the release date:
Last year, Christmas with The Chosen: The Messengers—a two-hour music special with a bonus Nativity-themed episode—came to theatres in the first week of December, which is usually one of the slowest weeks of the year. It was originally going to play in theatres for just two nights, but it ended up playing until Christmas and grossed almost $14 million in its first two weeks (for some reason, there are no figures for the rest of its release at Box Office Mojo).
The Season 3 premiere is coming out at a potentially busier time of year: the weekend before the American Thanksgiving. The only film currently set to go into wide release that week is She Said, an Oscar-bait drama about journalists working on the Harvey Weinstein exposé—but Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is coming out one week earlier (and will presumably dominate the box office for a while), and four films are going into wide release five days later, including Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans and the Disney cartoon Strange World.
For what it’s worth, there were two major releases during the equivalent week-before-Thanksgiving last year: Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which opened to $44 million, and King Richard, which opened to a mere $5.4 million. (That’s the film that Will Smith won his Oscar for, on the night of the infamous slap.)
Both of last year’s week-before-Thanksgiving movies opened in over 3,000 theatres. Christmas with the Chosen opened in “only” 1,700 theatres and grossed $4.2 million in its first weekend, plus another $4.9 million in the two days before that (because it opened on a Wednesday). It will be interesting to see how many theatres the Season 3 premiere plays in—and I suspect that two full episodes, featuring the full range of characters from the show (including Jonathan Roumie’s Jesus), could attract a bigger audience than a Christmas special with a bunch of musicians and a short episode about Mary.
Christmas with the Chosen was released to American theatres only, but if memory serves, the producers said at the time that they hoped to include Canada and possibly other countries in any future theatrical releases.
Keeping all the above factors in mind, I think it’s quite possible that The Chosen could beat She Said for the “top-grossing new movie of the week” award.
Jenkins said tonight that the Season 3 premiere will be “in theatres exclusively for a short period of time” before going to streaming. He did not specify how short that period of time would be, but for what it’s worth, Christmas with the Chosen went digital just eleven days after its theatrical premiere.
Jenkins also did not say what the release schedule would be like for the rest of Season 3. Last year, he released each episode of Season 2 more or less as soon as it was done—and that led to a very irregular release pattern: Episode 3 came out on the same night as Episode 2, but Episode 6 came out one whole month after Episode 5 (and Episode 5 ended on a controversial cliffhanger!).
If there are eight episodes in Season 3 altogether, and if the first two episodes are coming to theatres on November 18, then it would, hypothetically, be possible to release the rest of the season before the end of the year if each new episode came out on a weekly basis. (The sixth Friday after November 18 is December 30.) But even if a weekly release was in the works—and it might very well not be—I imagine it wouldn’t kick in until after the first two episodes came out online, which could be weeks after the theatrical premiere.
Then again, it’s possible the entire season will be released all at once, Netflix-style; if memory serves, the two halves of Season 1—which were shot about half a year apart in 2019—were each released that way. But it seems Jenkins is still shooting Season 3, and releasing eight episodes all at once, just a few months from now, would be a bigger challenge than releasing four at a time.
So at this point I’m assuming Season 3 won’t be finished until early 2023.
So, those are my highly speculative thoughts about the theatrical and digital release of Season 3. As for the content of Season 3… well, there’s just too little to comment on here. We’ve seen a few scenes, but we don’t have the context for them or any sense of how they fit into the bigger picture. I will say, though, that I’m intrigued by how frisky Simon and his wife Eden seem to be getting (again!) in one of the scenes that was previewed tonight. It’s not exactly common for Evangelical films to focus on the sexiness of married life, and it’s not exactly common for filmmakers of any sort to acknowledge that some of the apostles were married to begin with—so to see both of these things represented in the same scene is kind of mind-blowing.
Anyway. I don’t know how long the livestream will be online—Jenkins said the scenes he sneak-peeked will be coming down soon, at least—but for now, you can watch it here: