You often hear that the Bible is the best-selling book of all time. It turns out that movies and TV shows based on the Bible can set records in their own mediums, too.
The most recent example is The Bible, an ambitious mini-series produced by reality-TV mogul Mark Burnett (Survivor, The Apprentice) and his wife Roma Downey, former star of Touched by an Angel.
Four years after I first mentioned that a film version of the Langston Hughes musical Black Nativity was in the works — and three months after cameras finally started rolling on the adaptation — we now, at last, have some images from the film, courtesy of USA Today. Alas, all four of the pictures in question seem to be set pretty firmly within the real world, so we’ll just have to wait to see the “dream sequence” that re-tells the story of the birth of Jesus. The article that accompanies the new images does describe at least one part of that sequence, though:
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1. Brett Ratner isn’t the only director working on a movie about Hercules. Renny Harlin, whose credits include Die Hard 2 (1990) and Exorcist: The Beginning (2004), plans to start shooting Hercules 3D three months from now, and to release the film in March 2014 — or about five months before Ratner’s film. Harlin says his film will be “not a comic book, cartoony fantasy thing. It’s closer to Gladiator than flying horses.” Interestingly, Ratner himself was once attached to the film that Harlin is now directing. — Hollywood Reporter
2. After several years of hiccups and delays, Kasi Lemmons’ adaptation of the musical Black Nativity is finally in production. Fox Searchlight issued a press release last week to announce that cameras were rolling — or whatever cameras do in this increasingly digital era — and it also confirmed an earlier report that Tyrese Gibson has joined the cast, though it did not say who his character will be. — BlackFilm.com, ComingSoon.net
The on-again, off-again film adaptation of Black Nativity seems to be on again, now.
Two months ago, it was reported that the film, which is based on a 1961 musical and concerns a young black teen who spends Christmas with his grandparents, had been shelved because Samuel L. Jackson dropped out of the project.
Two months ago, I noted that there were no less than four movies in development that dealt in some way with the birth of Jesus — and, at the time, it looked like the one that would get made first was Black Nativity.
It was based on a popular musical, and it had actors like Samuel L. Jackson, Angela Bassett and Jennifer Hudson lined up for a story about a young black teen who spends Christmas with his grandparents, one of whom is a pastor — and along the way, there was going to be “a stylized, dream-sequence retelling of the classic Nativity story” in which the pastor would appear as “multiple characters”.
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