‘The Chosen’ Universe Expands

After splitting with media company Angel Studios due to a contract dispute last year, The Chosen producer Dallas Jenkins is launching 5&2 Studios to develop several upcoming Bible-inspired spinoffs in a kind of Miraculous Cinematic Universe–an MCU, if you will–in the glow of his wildly popular series about Jesus that became the most successful crowdfunded entertainment project in history and drew 200 million streaming viewers in 175 countries.

The comic analogy isn’t far off: The Chosen is an epic narrative property that makes millions from satellite products like comic books, clothing, study guides and companion novels written by Dallas’s father, Left Behind author Jerry B. Jenkins. Show creators announced franchise details at ChosenCon, a fan convention in Orlando featuring cast meet-and-greets, panel discussions, and sneak previews.

The proposed projects include an animated series following a 9-year-old girl who meets Jesus in Galilee around 30 AD, featuring the voice talents of Jordin Sparks, Jonathan Roumie (who portrays Jesus in The Chosen), Cobra Kai’s Paul Walter Hauser and Yvonne Orji from Insecure.

Fans can also wander in the wilderness with their favorite Bible characters in a six-episode reality series called The Chosen in the Wild with Bear Grylls. The celebrity survivalist and devout Anglican takes members of The Chosen cast on an outdoor adventure while jamming about faith and life, including Elizabeth Tabish (Mary Magdalene), Paras Patel (Matthew), Luke Dimyan (Judas), Roumie, and sports enthusiast/athlete Jenkins himself.

Other projects in development include a three-season series following Moses, a limited series about the life of Joseph, and Acts of the Apostles, which follows the lives of Jesus’ followers after his resurrection and details the founding of the Christian church.

The franchise hopes to broaden The Chosen’s surprisingly large and diverse viewership, with 30% of its fans either curious about Christianity or having no faith. Its gifted cast and polished production have successfully retreaded a sensitive, divisive theological origin story as a widely accessible historical drama by exploring Christian virtues through individual narratives surrounding a doe-eyed, unproblematic Jesus. Jenkins has mostly dodged two major pitfalls of faith-based media: turning an immersive, world-shaping journey into a clunky homily by shoehorning in an altar call or a conversion plea, and explicitly addressing more controversial beliefs that alienate entire demographics.

Viewership soared with the show’s free accessibility on The Chosen app, and its climbing numbers across streaming services spurred season four’s theatrical release to number two at the box office last February. The show’s pass-the-collection-plate crowdfunding model raised millions from over 100,000 donors to fully fund season five, which is incarnating in theaters just in time for Easter 2025. With an army of faithful volunteers to finance, translate and distribute Jenkins’ show through a planned seven seasons, and with The Chosen brand grossing almost $282 million to date, profits and storylines are multiplying like loaves and fishes. And now that he’s split from Angel Studios to create his own production company, Jenkins stands to double his profits.

The Chosen’s success is the real miracle: Christian media declined alongside its cultural prominence over the past century as Hollywood moved away from producing biblical epics like The Greatest Story Ever Told, Ben-Hur, and The King of Kings. While religious and sociopolitical views broadened and splintered, faith-based productions that once pushed film technology and visual creativity to stupendous scale (Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects), withered into corny, low-budget morality fables about near-death experiences and dusty marriages starring D-listers like Kevin Sorbo and Kirk Cameron.

But when ticketholders paid a collective $600 million to be shocked, enraptured or repulsed by a raw, bloody savior in Mel Gibson’s self-marketed, self-distributed The Passion of the Christ in 2004, it became the highest-grossing R-rated movie and moviemakers glimpsed the cinematic and financial merit in sweeping, emotionally compelling spiritual stories. Self-proclaimed atheist Ridley Scott cast Christian Bale and spent $140 million on 2014’s ambitious flop Gods and Kings, while that same year Darren Aronofsky attempted some of the most extensive effects ever used in his star-studded flood tale Noah, with Industrial Light and Magic stating that the film required “the most complicated rendering in the company’s history.” The Shack overperformed expectations to earn $97 million in 2017, The Prince of Egypt earned $218 million, and James Cavaziel’s Sound of Freedom grossed a remarkable $250 million in 2023.

Dallas Jenkins, whose father’s post-rapture novel series sold 80 million copies, is well-aware of the Christian entertainment market’s profitability and is following suit by re-mining a vein that Hollywood abandoned 70-plus years ago. Movies and shows that portray Christian values beyond inch-deep tropes of corrupt priests, abusive hillbillies and homicidal MAGA loons are rare enough and (according to the numbers) interesting enough that hundreds of millions of people will pay for it –both to produce and to consume.