Director Mel Gibson has announced that his upcoming film The Resurrection of the Christ has wrapped filming, with an expected release date of 2027.
Gibson revealed that, unlike The Passion of the Christ, which was released in 2004 on a $30 million budget and went on to gross more than $600 million worldwide, the sequel will have a budget of more than $250 million and will be released in two installments.
Jim Caviezel will not be returning as Jesus. The role has been recast with actor Jaakko Ohtonen (pictured below).
The film will also heavily feature CGI and special-effects shots, including depictions of the fall of the angels and Lucifer, the creation of the world, and Jesus in hell prior to his resurrection.It will conclude with the death of the last apostle.
Speaking about the film at a panel at Fan Expo Philadelphia, Gibson previously revealed:
It took me about eight years to write the script for the sequel, if we can call that The Resurrection of Christ, because it’s a very complex and almost impossible to understand subject, so that necessarily you have to underpin it with a great deal of all of salvation history and theology.
It was a very difficult thing to find and synthesize, because you have to understand, firstly, why it matters… You have to think, why is mankind so important in this process? Why are the big realms of good and evil slugging it up for the hearts and minds and souls of mankind? Why us? We’re just a bunch of f***ed up things. We’re imperfect.
You have to ask yourself, why are we important? Why are we making the sandwich? That whole huge story. And I think in order to understand that, you have to, you have to start with the fall of the angels in the firmament, before right at the beginning, is pretty crazy idea, what did that look like? I know what it looks like. It’s not one film, it’s two films, because it’s massive.
While the first film covered the 12 hours leading up to his death, the sequel is expected to cover the days after his death, intercut with scenes from Jesus in Hell and the fall of Lucifer. Gibson previously noted:
It is such a massive undertaking that you can’t do it lightly and you can’t do it quickly. You have to really consider what it is that you need to show in order to be poignant. It can’t be linear; you have to have many things to juxtapose against one another even from different time periods in order to illustrate what something means in a more full way. And I think it’s going to be a real jigsaw puzzle to do.
And I have two scripts right, and one of them is very structured and a very strong script and kind of more what you’d expect. And the other is like an acid trip and because you’re going into other realms and stuff. I mean you’re in hell.. It’s like, you know, you’re watching the angels fall..”
Gibson also told Joe Rogan on his recent podcast appearance that the film would conclude with the death of the last apostle.
[The script is] an acid trip. I’ve never read anything like it. There’s some crazy stuff. In order to tell the story properly you have to start with the fall of the angels. You’re in another realm. You need to go Hell. You need to go to Sheol.
You got to have [Satan]s] origin. I have ideas about how to do that and how to evoke things about to depict that. I’ve been thinking about that for a long time. It’s going to require a lot of planning. I’m not sure I can pull it off. It’s super ambitious, but I’m going to take a crack at it … It’s about trying to find a way in that’s not cheesy or obvious. It’s almost like a magic trick. [The story] goes from the fall of the angels to the death of the last apostle.
