{"id":72706,"date":"2022-04-16T14:22:57","date_gmt":"2022-04-16T21:22:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/?p=72706"},"modified":"2022-04-16T14:22:57","modified_gmt":"2022-04-16T21:22:57","slug":"the-chosen-and-its-unorthodox-marketing-campaign","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2022\/04\/the-chosen-and-its-unorthodox-marketing-campaign.html","title":{"rendered":"The Chosen<\/i> and its unorthodox marketing campaign"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
$\"\"$ <\/a><\/p>\n
It\u2019s Holy Week on the Western calendar, which for some Christians means extra church services. For fans of The Chosen<\/a><\/i>, on the other hand, it has meant reruns, discounted merchandise, and one highly unusual \u2014 and controversial \u2014 ad campaign.<\/p>\n
Series creator Dallas Jenkins has been hosting an eight-day binge-watch of the series on YouTube and other websites since last Sunday. At two episodes per night, the entire sixteen-episode marathon will reach its conclusion on Easter Sunday \u2014 at a time when some churches will still be meeting for evening prayer.<\/p>\n
More controversially, the show\u2019s current billboard campaign took an unexpected turn this week when the ads were \u201cdefaced\u201d with graffiti bearing harsh slogans like \u201cThe Chosen Is Boring\u201d and \u201cChosenSux.com\u201d, the latter of which turned out to be the URL for a website featuring a video in which Satan complains about the show\u2019s success:<\/p>\n
<\/iframe><\/p>\nWhile it\u2019s clear from the video that the graffiti was part of an elaborate ad campaign, many fans \u2014 not knowing the larger ad campaign \u2014 reacted badly to the \u201cdefaced\u201d billboards, and Jenkins apologized for any confusion the campaign may have caused in his intro to the Wednesday-night edition of the week\u2019s binge-watch series:<\/p>\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=cVE2x5RnwIM&t=15m<\/p>\nIn a press release, Jenkins apologized for not cluing fans into the ad campaign earlier, and he said the primary aim of the campaign was to attract new viewers:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\u201cI do regret not informing and including our core fans in our defacing gag, because that caused some unintended confusion and disappointment,\u201d said Chosen creator Dallas Jenkins. \u201cBut moving forward, we\u2019re extremely excited about this campaign and are already seeing new audiences who previously weren\u2019t interested in the show.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\nInterestingly, there are aspects to the ad campaign that would have been controversial to earlier generations of evangelicals but don\u2019t seem to have attracted much comment.<\/p>\nFor example, words like \u201csucks\u201d (or \u201csux\u201d) would have been beyond the pale in evangelical pop culture not too long ago. Indeed, the use of that word caused a stir in the mainstream<\/i> press when a kid said \u201cYou suck!\u201d in an episode of Uncle Buck<\/i> in the early 1990s.<\/p>\nAlso, the video suggests that demons are often ascending to Heaven because they want to be like Jesus, which deviates from the once-standard evangelical belief that no one goes to Heaven after being sent to Hell \u2014 not humans, and certainly not fallen angels.<\/p>\nThe depiction of demons going back to Heaven is particularly striking in light of the fact that it\u2019s reminiscent of a similar plot element in Darren Aronofsky\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/tag\/noah-2014\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\">Noah<\/a><\/i>, which some people found quite controversial at the time \u2014 and much of the hype surrounding The Chosen<\/i> has explicitly tried to distance the series from films like that one.<\/p>\nThe video\u2019s depiction of the demons is also interesting in light of the fact that The Chosen<\/i> has depicted at least two exorcisms so far, but no scenes of Jesus interacting with Satan himself. At the risk of taking this video too seriously \u2014 clearly it was meant to be taken as a joke \u2014 one cannot but help but wonder what it says about the underlying theology of the show itself. The producers say the video was supposed to be <a href=\"https:\/\/www.deseret.com\/entertainment\/2022\/4\/14\/23025270\/defaced-billboards-part-of-strategic-ad-campaign-by-the-chosen-to-grow-audience\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\" class=\" decorated-link\">satirical<\/a> like C.S. Lewis\u2019s The Screwtape Letters<\/i> \u2014 and certainly, depicting Hell as a job training site fits the bill \u2014 but I don\u2019t think Lewis ever contradicted the actual theology he was trying to teach.<\/p>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/227\/2022\/04\/chosen-billboard-scaled.jpg\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/227\/2022\/04\/chosen-billboard-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1024\" height=\"768\" class=\"alignnone size-large wp-image-72804\"><\/a><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Can demons be saved? An edgy ad campaign for the popular life-of-Jesus series is surprisingly open to the idea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":72799,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[644,4490,4047,63,431,6308,6445],"class_list":["post-72706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-angels","tag-chosen","tag-dallas-jenkins","tag-noah-2014","tag-satan","tag-screwtape-letters","tag-uncle-buck-1990"],"yoast_head":"\n<title>The Chosen and its unorthodox marketing campaign<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Can demons be saved? 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