King of Kings
There is a very large portion of the cinematic/television market that’s ignored in the mainstream press, productions that focus on Christianity, namely the retelling of literal Bible stories.
One such project, King of Kings, an animated version of the story of who else, Jesus Christ, has now been released and set a number of different records. First, with a $19 million opening, that’s the highest for an animated biblical movie, passing up The Prince of Egypt from 27 years back which had a $14.5 million opening (but inflation, etc.).
Perhaps the biggest accomplishment of King of Kings is its Cinemascore audience rating, a perfect A+, and one of only 127 movie in the 40+ years of the tracker, to get that score. Others include the likes of Titanic, Avengers Endgame, The King’s Speech and Frozen. That has also translated into a 97% Rotten Tomatoes audience score that’s currently the highest at the box office (and could be the highest of the year). That’s up from a 64% critic score, which is decent enough.
King of Kings
What may surprise you about this movie is the cast. It’s almost entirely huge names in these roles. We have:
- Oscar Isaac – Jesus Christ
- Pierce Brosnan – Pontius Pilate
- Mark Hamill – King Herod
- Ben Kingsley – High Priest Caiaphas
- Forest Whitaker – Peter
- Kenneth Branagh – Charles Dickens (this is based on a Dickens telling)
- Uma Thurman – Catherine Dickens
I mean, what? How many Oscars and nominations are between them there? Three Star Wars stars on top of that. I have no idea how this movie managed to assemble this cast, but it was no doubt extremely expensive. Even with solid box office receipts, I do wonder how they can match whatever those cast salaries may have cost.
When I say these kinds of projects are overlooked, I’m also referring to the multi-season, hugely watched Jesus story on streaming, The Chosen. Most recently, House of David was a really big hit on Amazon Prime Video and was renewed for a second season. At one point it was beating recent releases like Invincible and Reacher, and yet no one was talking about it.
It’s a market not to be discounted. There are not that many Hollywood projects based on the Bible, and because of that, when ones do emerge, especially ones with big names or at least of decent quality, they can turn into huge hits. And once again we’re seeing that here.
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