The writers’ and actors’ strike in Hollywood could drag on for months. Given that all work connected with movies – from voiceovers to promotion – is off-limits, this has serious implications for not just upcoming productions but those already in the pipeline.
A small number of independent production companies (less than 40 at the last count) has been given a waiver and allowed to continue filming, because they are truly independent of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) and accept whatever terms are agreed when the strike is settled. Ironically, one of those productions, The Chosen, is phenomenally successful but, until recent times, was relatively invisible.
Dallas Jenkins, producer, director and co-writer of The Chosen, the most successful streamed series that you have probably never heard of, must be breathing a sigh of relief to be among those granted a waiver. He is in the last weeks of filming season four of the drama. Mind you, if ever a series deserved the term independent, it is The Chosen, the first multi-season series ever made about the life of Jesus.
Hollywood has a blind spot about Christian material. (At times it appears closer to an active dislike of it.) However, it is not just Hollywood’s aversion to Christian material that is the problem. A lot of Christian movies and television have terrible production values. From the beginning, Jenkins was determined that would never be true of his series. He knew that if he were to achieve his planned seven seasons about the life and ministry of Jesus, he would need to secure financial backing through unconventional means. He brought his idea to VidAngel, now Angel Studios. The Chosen works through crowdfunding – or, more accurately, the support of a passionate fan base, who will pay $1,000 to be an extra in, say, the filming of the Sermon on the Mount. In this way, it has become the most successful crowdfunded series ever: 74,346 people raised $10 million for season one. Some $45 million was raised for season two, with the average donation hovering around $65, although some have given much more.
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Jonathan Roumie, a Catholic actor who plays Jesus with a mixture of humour and tenderness, is central to the series. The production team say there have been more than 400 million individual views of the first two series alone, and it has been subtitled in more than 62 languages.
This kind of success was invisible to many, as illustrated by an article in Variety magazine by Brent Lang. In his review of Sound of Freedom, another Christian movie, Lang was puzzled by the success of Jesus Revolution, a film loosely based on the Californian Jesus People in the early 1970s. He was particularly amazed by “the improbable $53 million taken at the global box [by Jesus Revolution] despite the fact that the biggest star in that movie was Kelsey Grammer” (of Cheers and Frasier fame).
In fact, the biggest star in Jesus Revolution was Roumie, who played controversial hippie minister Lonnie Frisbee. Lang missed this detail, despite mentioning that The Chosen and Sound of Freedom are both connected to Angel Studios.
Sound of Freedom stars Jim Caviezel, another actor famous for portraying Jesus, previously in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Although I loved crime series Person of Interest, which featured Caviezel from 2011 to 2016, Sound of Freedom does not call to me strongly – and not just because Caviezel has become a conspiracy theorist. Some speculate that the way he was treated by Hollywood after The Passion of the Christ hastened his descent into believing the myth, for example, that prominent people are harvesting the blood of children to rejuvenate themselves. Nor is my lack of enthusiasm because I am more of a wanting to watch Barbie and Oppenheimer on the same day type of person.
Sound of Freedom looks at the important topic of child sex trafficking through the lens of the true story of Tim Ballard, a former government agent. My fear is that it will present child sex trafficking as a problem far away, to be solved by heroes, not as something happening in our own country. Not having seen it, I am relying on reviews, some from unexpected sources such as Variety’s Owen Glieberman, who found it to be “a compelling movie that shines an authentic light on one of the crucial criminal horrors of our time”. The impressive box-office figures suggests it has tapped into a market that Hollywood shies away from – people who want to see high-quality productions that portray faith positively.
It is ironic that shows like The Chosen, somewhat invisible to those obsessed with or working in Hollywood, may have been insulated from the strike by its distance from traditional Hollywood values. It is equally ironic that it may soon gain new viewers through the simple fact of being able to be completed.