The Chosen: Out of The Ashes of A Failure.

 (Picture from TBN)

The critically acclaimed series “The Chosen” began coming to prominence in 2020, when the world went into lockdown, with bord and fearful people looking for distractions to fill their quarantined hours.  Yet its story began three years before that with a Box Office Bomb and a short film that went viral, leading to the biggest-grossing crowdfunded media project of all time.  And that was just the first of the records it set.

(Dallas's testimony can be seen on YouTube, via The Angel App and The Chosen App. Please feel free to watch it it for yourself,... right after you have read this blog and shared it with your friends.😼😼😼)

 

From a Bright Future to No Future.

Director, Dallas Jenkins, got two clear messages in 2017. First, Hollywood was not interested, and it was not his job to feed the five thousand; yours is to provide the loaves and fish!  He knew what the first part meant.  His feature movie, “The Resurrection of Gavin Stone”, had just bombed at the US box office, and the production company pulled the plug on the entire series. 

The mood was at an all-time low in the Jenkins’ household, and hours of prayer returned with the impression that they should read the story of The Feeding of the Five Thousand and the phrase “I do impossible math!” Yet nothing more happened that weekend until,  at four in the morning, a random message popped up in Dallas’s chat box from a friend in Romania saying, “Remember, it is not your job to feed the five thousand; it’s just to bring the loaves and fish.”  Dallas says he surrendered all ambition after that and said to God that he would now put his future in His hands, and if that even meant not making another movie, then that was fine with him.

In late 2017, Dallas did make another movie.  This time it was a short film for his church’s Christmas service. “The Shepherd,” told the story of the birth of Christ from the perspective of the shepherds, and Dallas mused how it would be a great idea to produce a multi-seasoned show about the life of Christ, told through the eyes of people he met.  This short film ended up in the hands of Angel Studios, who proposed crowdfunding to Dallas.

 Crowd Funding Pitfalls

The previous crowd-funded media project brought in just under $5 million.  Crowdfunding involves putting out an advert with some description and inviting people to invest in a project.  It has several advantages in that investors can invest at a range of levels. For example, it could be a lump sum or small chunks over a period. 

It could also be varied amounts.  There was the minimum, but there was no obligation to invest more.  Yet, as previously stated, crowdfunding was known for raising a small amount of money.  The previous crowdfunding record took time to be raised, and Dallas believed they would raise no more than a few thousand dollars.  It could take weeks to catch on, and they still needed to learn how much they might grow in the two months they had set for the fundraising period.  The pitch to investors rested on only two things: The short film “The Shepherd” and the passionate vision of a failed Hollywood director coming off the biggest failure of his career.

“I Do Impossible Math!”

Dallas always says his wife, Amanda, is more sensitive to God’s voice than he is.  He hoped, at best, for a few thousand dollars to be raised, but as the days went into weeks, he became even more aware that this project was less and less about his responsibility but God’s ability!

In disbelief, Dallas and Amanda checked the final amount in the closing hours of the fundraising campaign. One thousand nine hundred investors had put up over 10 million dollars for the project, smashing the previous crowdfunding record.

“I do impossible Math!” Amanda exclaimed, realising the meaning of that word from God so many months before, spoken in Dallas’s darkest hours.

One season of The Chosen was fully funded!