Watch: The first trailer for The Chosen Season 4, coming to theatres early next year
A Christmas-episode super-cut is coming to theatres soon, too.
Big news for fans of The Chosen: The entire fourth season of the life-of-Jesus series is coming to theatres next year before it goes to streaming, while the two existing Christmas episodes—The Shepherd and The Messengers—are being re-edited into a sort of super-episode that will play in theatres, too, this Christmas.
Going full theatrical for Season 4
Series creator Dallas Jenkins, who first floated the possibility of releasing the entire fourth season theatrically during a livestream back in July, made the news official last night at The Chosen Insiders Conference (aka “ChosenCon”) in Dallas, Texas.
The Chosen Season 4 will come to theatres in two- or three-episode batches, like so:
Episodes 1-3 will come out Thursday, February 1, 2024.
Episodes 4-6 will come out Thursday, February 15, 2024.
Episodes 7-8 will come out Thursday, February 29, 2024.
Along with the announcement, there was a teaser trailer for Season 4:
A few quick thoughts about the trailer, if I may:
It seems obvious that this season will deal with the death of John the Baptist (at Salome’s request) and the resurrection of Lazarus, for starters.
Assuming that is Salome dancing at the 23-second mark, she’s being unusually… gymnastic, or acrobatic, about it. Most films emphasize the eroticism of her dance, to signify her appeal to Herod Antipas’s baser impulses; this film seems to be emphasizing her athleticism, so much so that I thought I was looking at Simon the Zealot at first (Alaa Safi, the actor who plays Simon, is also a stuntman and martial artist, and we’ve seen him spin in the air like that in previous episodes).
Mary Magdalene looks into a tomb. This is foreshadowing, obviously. Or is it more than that? Is this a flash-forward of some sort? (I assume she’s looking into Lazarus’s tomb, but we’ve seen flash-forwards before in this series…)
Also, is Judas Iscariot already collecting his pieces of silver? The death of Jesus isn’t supposed to happen until Season 6, two whole seasons from now…
A poster was released for Season 4, too:
The theatrical release of Season 4 marks the first time that the release pattern for an entire season of The Chosen has been announced in advance.
Season 1 was filmed in two halves, as the crowdfunding trickled in. The first half was released in April 2019 and the second half in December 2019.
Season 2 was shot all at once, but each episode came out as soon as it was finished, without following any sort of schedule. The second and third episodes came out together, as part of the same livestream, but the gaps between the other episodes ranged from one week to one month.
Season 3 had an even more complicated release: the first two episodes premiered in theatres, then the first six episodes began streaming on a weekly basis three weeks later (which meant that people who saw Episode 2 on opening day in the theatre had to wait over five weeks to see Episode 3 online), and then, after Episode 6 came out, it was announced that Episodes 7 & 8 would premiere in theatres two and a half weeks after that, before going to streaming a few days later.
Suffice it to say that Season 4 won’t be as erratic as all that. Instead, viewers will get to see it at a steady pace, at least in theatres. The only question now is what sort of streaming release the season will get: weekly, or one big binge-dump? (I mean, if all the episodes are finished and all the spoilers are already out there…)
Meanwhile, in case you’re wondering what sort of competition The Chosen will have when it comes to theatres next year:
Thursday Feb 1 - Sunday Feb 4 — Episodes 1-3 are coming out the same weekend as Wise Guys (a gangster movie starring Robert De Niro) and Argylle (an action comedy starring Henry Cavill and Bryce Dallas Howard).
Thursday Feb 15 - Sunday Feb 18 — Episodes 4-6 are coming out the same weekend as Madame Web (a superhero movie starring Dakota Johnson) and Bob Marley: One Love (a biopic starring Kingsley Ben-Adir).
Thursday Feb 29 - Sunday Mar 3 — Episodes 7-8 are coming out the same weekend as The Fall Guy (an action movie starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt) and Elio (a sci-fi Pixar film starring Yonas Kibreab and America Ferrera).
Also worth noting: the “faith-based” movie Ordinary Angels—which was produced by the same friends of The Chosen who made Jesus Revolution, and which was going to come out last Friday until Taylor Swift came along and scared everybody off—is now coming out on February 23, which is between two of The Chosen’s theatrical releases.
Re-editing the Christmas classics
But first, before all that, there’s going to be a new Christmas special called Christmas with The Chosen: Holy Night. And here are some of the key details about that:
It will play in North American theatres December 12-17, 2023.
It will feature seven music performances, including a brand new one by Andrea and Matteo Bocelli, as well as two new monologues.
It will also feature a sort of Christmas-episode super-cut that mixes footage from The Shepherd, the “pilot episode” that kicked off the show’s crowdfunding campaign in 2017, with footage from The Messengers, an episode that played in theatres as part of another Christmas special in 2021.
Tickets go on sale next month, on November 20.
A few quick questions and speculations, regarding the Christmas episode:
Will there be any new footage, as there was when, say, The Bible miniseries was re-edited into the feature film Son of God? I think also of the time Francis Ford Coppola put new scenes into the first two Godfather films when he re-edited them into a super-long mini-series that told the story in chronological order.
Alternatively, I wonder if this super-episode will delete any footage; in particular, I wonder if it will drop the framing narrative from The Messengers—which takes place half a century after the main story—the same way George Lucas deleted the “Old Indy” scenes from the re-edited Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.
Given that the two Christmas episodes were shot four years apart, and probably in different parts of the country, I am curious to see how seamlessly they can be edited together—particularly where people, places, and objects that appear in both episodes are concerned. Will the stable where Jesus was born look different from shot to shot? And how noticeable will it be that Sara Anne, the actress who plays Mary, is 19 in some shots and 23 in others? (Again, I think of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, and how the actors who play young Indy get noticeably older or younger from scene to scene in some of the re-edited episodes.)
Will this year’s Christmas special get a streaming release, like the ones in 2020 and 2021 did? (There was no special in 2022 because Season 3 was coming out at the time.) This year’s special is playing “exclusively in theaters” until one week before Christmas Eve, but there’s no word yet about any digital release.
So, to sum up…
It occurs to me that the past week has been a very busy one for Bible-movie news—first we had the world premiere of The Book of Clarence, then we had the first clip from Journey to Bethlehem, and now there’s The Chosen and its four (count ’em, four!) theatrical release dates—so, if you need any help keeping track of it all, here’s a list of all the Bible movies I can think of that are coming out in the next few months:
November 10 — Journey to Bethlehem
December 1 — The Shift (a sci-fi take on the book of Job, executive-produced by Dallas Jenkins and featuring a few actors from The Chosen)
December 12 — Christmas with The Chosen: Holy Night
January 12 — The Book of Clarence
February 1 — The Chosen Season 4: Episodes 1-3
February 15 — The Chosen Season 4: Episodes 4-6
February 29 — The Chosen Season 4: Episodes 7-8
For all I know, there may be others; if I neglected to include any, please let me know.
All of The Chosen’s upcoming theatrical releases are being handled by Fathom Events, the company that handled their previous theatrical releases. Click here for their page on Christmas with The Chosen: Holy Night, and here for their page on Season 4.
And that, I think, about covers it.
Now I just have to finish doing my episode-by-episode analysis of The Chosen Season 3 before Season 4 comes out. We’ll see how busy the other films keep me!
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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 MessengersSeason 3: Episodes 1 & 2 notes | Episodes 7 & 8 notes | scripture index
Episode recaps: one | two | three | four | five | six | seven | eight
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The Chosen can be streamed via Angel Studios or the show’s app (Android | Apple).