Dallas Jenkins’ ‘The Chosen’ Cuts Ties With Mormon Studio Over Breach of Contract

Dallas Jenkins has announced that he and The Chosen have formally cut ties with Angel Studio, the Mormon media conglomerate that helped create, fund, and distribute the hit TV show, after an arbiter found multiple material breaches of contract on behalf of the studio. The ruling allows The Chosen to terminate their contract, part ways for good, and manage and distribute the show as they see fit and in a way that is economically sustainable, but will do little to offset other controversies Dallas and the show have been involved in:

While Angel Studios (then known as Vidcom) helped launch the show in 2017, The Chosen entered into a new license agreement and contract with them in 2022. Shortly thereafter, they accused Angel of monkeying about and breaching their contract, causing the latter to seek a termination.

Disagreements and legal wrangling over the show have impacted its release schedule, resulting in long delays between seasons – three seasons in five years. Rather than sue, however, Dallas and his team entered arbitration, which recently ruled in his favor. Dallas explained in a live stream:

Our contention is that shortly after the agreement (in 2022) Angel studios breached our contract on multiple occasions to the extent that we believed and should be terminated which would dissolve our relationship with Angel.

Angel, of course, disagrees with that assessment, and ultimately the only way to solve the dispute was to exercise the provision in the contract where we engaged a third party arbitrator. We wanted to solve this in a biblical way, which was to not make it a public spectacle. Private arbitration was the only way to do this in a way that didn’t harm the show or the reputation of Jesus and this project.

Jenkins insisted that “no one was doing this for greed or spite or for more fame or to go “Hollywood” but rather because they want “this show to reach over a billion people” and had “significant differences of opinion on how to do that and what our future should be.”

The move should help assuage some critics who have accused the show of being beholden to their Mormon studio partnership that now has no involvement with the series, but it will likely do little to stem criticism over the series’ theological inaccuracies and mischaracterizations of the biblical account.

As for Angel Studios, for whom The Chosen has been by far their largest and most lucrative property, they have removed all references of it from their website, saying in a statement:

“Sadly, The Chosen, Inc has terminated its agreement with Angel Studios. We hope that one day the agreement may be restored. The team at Angel Studios is so happy we were able to be instrumental in the founding of The Chosen and thrilled our long hours of hard work over the last 8 years helped it become the worldwide success it is.”

Note: Perhaps Angel Studios will get involved with the similarly named yet overtly Mormon TV series The Promised, which looks to have The Chosen in its sights.

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