You may remember that Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ caused quite a stir when it was released back in 2004. The violent religious film was not only at the center of some major controversy, but ultimately brought in $611.9 million at the global box office. That sets a pretty high bar for the developing sequel, The Resurrection, but star Jim Caviezel is actually promising that the movie will be even bigger than the original. In fact, he went as far as to say,
I won't tell you how he's going to go about it. But I'll tell you this much, the film he's going to do is going to be the biggest film in history. It's that good.
Right now we don't know a great deal about Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ sequel (a situation clearly not helped by Jim Caviezel), but the actor is making some crazy big promises before a single frame has been shot. Caviezel will soon be appearing in another Christianity-inspired feature, playing Paul in Paul, Apostle of Christ, but USA Today got him talking about the future during a recent interview. While you may think that only superhero features and Star Wars can make serious money at the modern box office, the man best known for playing Jesus Christ thinks differently.
To Jim Caviezel's credit, The Passion of the Christ did make a remarkable amount of money during its theatrical run - and remains a record holder to this day. After 14 years it continues to stand as the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time, pulling in $370.8 million domestically. Other titles have come close, including Deadpool ($363.1 million), American Sniper ($350.1 million) and IT ($327.5 million), but the number remains unmatched.
Realistically, however, it's pretty hard to believe that Jim Caviezel's prediction about The Passion of the Christ 2 will come true. After all, I specified "R-rated" above because the original's numbers aren't that huge from a larger perspective. Being the "biggest film in history" means The Resurrection making more than Avatar did at the global box office, and that would require the sequel (currently ranked #132 on the all-time worldwide charts) making more than four-and-a-half times the international haul of its predecessor. That is probably not happening.
As revealed by Mel Gibson back in late 2016, The Resurrection will - as you might guess - tell the story of what happened after Jesus Christ was crucified. Gibson is collaborating on the project with Randall Wallace, who is best known for writing the Academy Award-nominated screenplay for Braveheart. This is the first update we've heard about the project in a fairly long while, but apparently it's still coming together. Obviously we can't say when the film may come out because we don't know when it plans to actually go into production, but you can be sure that we'll have the information for you as quickly as it becomes available.
