It has been nearly two decades since DreamWorks released the first animated Bible movie produced by a major Hollywood studio,1 The Prince of Egypt, and next month we will finally see the second such film, when Sony releases The Star.
The two films don’t necessarily have a lot in common apart from the biblical angle — one is Old Testament and the other New, one was a big-budget in-house production while the other was farmed out to a cheaper Canadian firm2 — but one thing the two films do have in common is a theme song sung, in whole or in part, by Mariah Carey.
The song for the new film — named, like the film, ‘The Star’ — was released on Thursday night. There is no video for it (yet), but you can listen to it via Spotify:
The studio has also released this “behind the scenes” video about the song:
And just for old times’ sake, here is the video for ‘When You Believe’, the theme song from 1998’s The Prince of Egypt, which was a duet between Carey and Whitney Houston:
The soundtrack comes out October 27 (click here for a full track listing), and the film will come to theatres across North America on November 17.
November 16 update: The new song now has a music video of its own:
Check out earlier The Star trailers and other videos here:
- The teaser trailer (July 26, 2017)
- The official trailer, the ‘The Soundtrack of the Film’ and A Great Big World featurettes, and the ‘Life Is Good’ lyric video (October 13, 2017)
- The Fifth Harmony featurette and the ‘Can You See’ lyric video (October 17, 2017)
1. I’m referring to feature films, obviously. Disney, for its part, has produced a few Bible-themed short films, such as Father Noah’s Ark (1933) and The Small One (1978). There was also a sequence based on the Noah story in the feature-length anthology Fantasia 2000 (1999).
2. The Prince of Egypt had a reported budget of $60 million, which was typical for a Disney-quality film at that time (cf. 1995’s Pocahontas: $55 million; 1995’s Toy Story: $30 million; 1996’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame: $70 million; 1997’s Hercules: $85 million; 1998’s Mulan: $70 million; 1998’s A Bug’s Life: $45 million; all figures are based on a quick Google search). The Star, for its part, is said to have cost as little as $18 million at a time when the typical Disney, Pixar or DreamWorks film costs between $125 million and $200 million.
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