The Chosen's successors: a new Left Behind movie and the Jesus Revolution?

Two movies coming out in the next three months have ties of sorts to The Chosen, but only one has really emphasized those ties in its marketing.

So, now that The Chosen Season 3: Episodes 1 & 2 is a box-office smash, what is the next big “faith-based” movie going to be? Two possibilities loom on the immediate horizon—and they both have connections, of one sort or another, to The Chosen, though only one of them has really emphasized those connections in its marketing.

The most obvious contender is Jesus Revolution, which is being released by Lionsgate—the studio behind The Hunger Games and John Wick—on February 24.

As I’ve noted before, one of that film’s big selling points is that it stars Jonathan Roumie, who plays Jesus on The Chosen, as Lonnie Frisbee, a real-life hippie preacher who was active in the late ’60s and sometimes joked about looking like Jesus.

But there are other connections between Jesus Revolution and The Chosen, too, and the filmmakers haven’t been shy about promoting each other’s work.

Among other things, a recent promotional video for The Chosen revealed that Jesus Revolution co-director Jon Erwin visited the set of The Chosen while they were shooting a particularly big scene—and in the video, Erwin admits to “stealing a bunch of stuff” from The Chosen, including actors such as Roumie, for his film.

But before that film comes out, there is another film coming: Today it was announced that Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist is coming to theatres January 26.

This film, of course, is the latest adaptation of the Left Behind novels co-written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins—the latter of whom is the father of Dallas Jenkins, the co-writer and director of The Chosen. (The elder Jenkins is directly involved in The Chosen too, insofar as he is writing the novelizations of his son’s series.)

I don’t know to what degree the Jenkinses are involved in the new Left Behind movie. The elder Jenkins helped to promote the last Left Behind film eight years ago, but I haven’t seen him do anything like that for the new film yet; and while the Left Behind Facebook page recently hyped The Chosen’s theatrical release, I am not aware of The Chosen reciprocating the attention. (Dallas Jenkins has often talked about his dad’s books, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard him talk about the Left Behind films.)

Still, there are connections one can make, in a six-degrees-of-separation sort of way. The new Left Behind movie is directed by Kevin Sorbo, who also stars in the film as Rayford Steele, the airline pilot played in previous films by Brad Johnson and Nicolas Cage—and Sorbo previously starred in a Dallas Jenkins film called What If….

The new Left Behind movie is also being released in theatres by Fathom Events, the same company that is currently handling The Chosen’s theatrical release.

The fact that Left Behind and Jesus Revolution are coming out so close together is particularly interesting when you consider that Left Behind represents something that is missing from Jesus Revolution.

Specifically, Left Behind represents a form of end-times theology that was absolutely central to the Jesus movement of the ’60s and ’70s but has been utterly expunged from the movie about that movement. This theology—popularized in albums like Larry Norman’s Upon This Rock (1969), books like Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), and movies like A Thief in the Night (1972)—emphasized belief in an imminent Rapture that would take all the true believing Christians out of this world before the Antichrist ruled the Earth for a seven-year period known as the Tribulation.

This theology was central to the rise of Calvary Chapel, the community that is depicted in Jesus Revolution. The real-life Pastor Chuck Smith—who is played by Kelsey Grammer in the film—made belief in the Rapture one of his church’s “foundational beliefs” and said there was “no excuse for ambiguity” on this subject. (My favorite Christian band, Daniel Amos, got its start at Calvary Chapel and released an album of end-times songs interspersed with narration by Smith.)

Those beliefs went on to propel the success of the Left Behind books, the first of which came out in 1995.¹ And they haven’t gone away; Greg Laurie, who is played in Jesus Revolution by Joel Courtney, has used the Covid pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as jumping-off points for discussing the end times in recent years.

But if the screenplay I’ve read is anything to go by, Jesus Revolution won’t get into any of that end-times talk. It’s aiming for a much broader Christian audience—the sort of people who went to previous Erwin brothers movies like I Can Only Imagine and American Underdog, uplifting films about pop stars and sports heroes.

And so far, The Chosen hasn’t really gotten into any of that end-times talk either. Yes, there have been nods to the Day of Judgment, but that could easily be taken to mean nothing more than the judgment that awaits people after they die. As far as prophecies about this world are concerned, the series has, if anything, expressed skepticism about taking the apocalyptic prophecies of the Bible too literally; note how Philip calls a quote from Zechariah “all this craziness” in Season 2 Episode 3.

At any rate, it’s interesting to see these shows all coming out so close together, and to see which ones emphasize their links to each other and which ones don’t.

And just to make things even more interesting: Dallas Jenkins has floated the possibility a few times now of showing the last two episodes of The Chosen Season 3 in theatres, too, and if he sticks to his plan to release the series on a weekly basis starting in December, then the time to release those last two episodes would presumably be in… January, right around the time the Left Behind movie is coming out.

So, that could be interesting.

In the meantime, here are the trailers for both of next year’s movies. I’ve posted the Jesus Revolution trailer before, but why not give it another look:

And here is the trailer for Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist:

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My past coverage of the Left Behind franchise includes:

• ‘Christian Filmmakers Flock to End-times Features’ (Christianity Today, Oct 1999)

• ‘Almighty dollars’ (Vancouver Sun, Feb 2001)

• ‘Interview: Kirk Cameron’ (Christianity Today Movies, Sep 2008)

• ‘LaHaye hated the first Left Behind film, but loves the reboot’ (FilmChat, Feb 2014)

• ‘From The Song to the Left Behind reboot: are Christian films becoming more comfortable with sexuality?’ (FilmChat, Sep 2014)

• ‘Exclusive: Randy LaHaye on playing the Antichrist, planning his own movie about the Resurrection, and rebooting the Rapture with Vanished | Left Behind: Next Generation’ (FilmChat, Sep 2016)

See also my ‘End-times fiction article archive’, which was last updated in 2008, and the Left Behind tag at my FilmChat blog, which was last updated six months ago.

1. It’s a little weird to think that the gap between the first Left Behind book and today is longer than the gap between the first Left Behind book and the first Larry Norman album, which introduced the world to ‘I Wish We’d All Been Ready’ (the song with the lyric “The Son has come, and you’ve been left behind”), but anyhoo.