The series The Chosen – The Chosen It may not turn water into wine, but it knows how to do marketing like few others, turning an independent production into cinema success. Started in 2019, from an online crowdfunding, the TV series created its own streaming platform, where it still shows the program for free, subtitled and dubbed, before reaching the home of giants like Netflix and even the SBT. As if its success as a TV series was not enough, its creators adopted a surprising strategy: in its fourth season, The Chosen has been shown in theaters before. In Brazil, episodes 3 and 4 have just debuted in theaters, while episodes 5 and 6 arrive on May 16th and the last two on the 30th of the same month.
The first two chapters have already proved to be surprising, raising more than 12 million reais here. The success, however, is not entirely unexpected — on the contrary, it comes from a miraculous recipe that had already been implemented in the United States, where the exhibition of the entire season generated more than 30 million dollars in cinemas. The ingenious strategy cultivates a vast audience by making the previous seasons of the program available for free on its official website, while the fourth phase only reaches the internet after its complete exhibition in cinemas.
Worldwide distribution rights were acquired by Lionsgate in 2022, but its origins, as stated above, are more humble. The Chosen started in 2017 with a short episode, a kind of trailer, made to support the crowdfunding project. After captivating 16,000 contributors and raising more than 10 million dollars, the series began producing its first season, launched in 2019. It was such a success that, by the end of 2022, at least 108 million people had watched at least part of an episode, according to Forbes American, and more than 40 million dollars were raised by the initiative — capital destined for the plan to complete it after seven seasons.
In the United States, the fourth season was divided into three blocks instead of four and ended the broadcast cycle with the premiere of the last part on February 29th. Biblical, the series tells the story of Jesus Christ and his followers, with the aim of “humanizing” the figure and religious parables, according to the creator Dallas Jenkins. With no release date, the fifth season of the saga is already being filmed and should bring the Christian Messiah back to theaters at some point in 2025.
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