The latest installment of The Chosen series pulled off a surprise performance at the box office during its debut weekend. The Chosen: Last Supper – Part 1 is the title under which Fathom Events is distributing the faith-based franchise’s first batch of episodes of the fifth season. The franchise has now passed a major milestone, proving that television can find an audience in cinemas, provided it’s marketed correctly. The core audience for The Chosen showed up in droves this weekend as the first batch of episodes debuted in over 2,200 theaters.
The Chosen: Last Supper generated over $11 million across its first three days of release, which is more than the entire theatrical haul of the recently released film The Last Supper, with which it has no connection. This was good enough for a third-place finish on the domestic charts, behind this week’s new release, A Working Man, and last week’s holdover, Snow White. The Chosen: The Last Supper‘s opening weekend haul was superior to the lifetime hauls of the second and third installments of the fourth season.
The Chosen franchise began its theatrical journey in 2021 with Christmas with the Chosen: The Messengers, which grossed around $13 million domestically. The third season grossed a total of $20 million, while the fourth season grossed a total of around $30 million. The Chosen franchise has generated more than $80 million at the domestic box office so far. As was observed with The Last Supper recently, faith-based films are usually embraced by their target audience. While The Chosen: The Last Supper doesn’t yet have an official Rotten Tomatoes score, its audience rating stands at a near-perfect 99%.
Faith-Based Movies Have a Devoted Audience
The first faith-based film to truly break out was director Mel Gibson‘s The Passion of the Christ, which grossed over $600 million worldwide around two decades ago and, until recently, remained the highest-grossing R-rated film in history. Then, films such as God’s Not Dead and Jesus Revolution also broke out successfully. Last year, even as Lionsgate was delivering bomb after bomb, two faith-based movies — Unsung Hero and Ordinary Angels — grossed around $20 million each. The remaining episodes of The Chosen’s fifth season will also be released theatrically over the next few weeks.
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