Director Dallas Jenkins On Studios Wanting More Religious Content In Movies

This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. So much of your personal info is out of your control. Like your insurance provider that has your social security number, and your favorite retailer that has your payment details. If they get breached, your information – your identity – is vulnerable. That's why LifeLock monitors millions of data points a second for threats. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Save up to 40% your first year at lifelock.com slash podcast.

Terms apply. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Upgrade your business with Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet. Shop pay boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning fewer carts going abandoned and more sales going cha-ching. So if you're into growing your business, get a commerce platform that's ready to sell wherever your customers are.

Visit Shopify.com to upgrade your selling today. From his mouth to your ears, it's Brian Kilmeade. Hey y'all, I can't wait for you to experience the true spirit of Christmas in the charming new movie, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. My new rendition of Go Tell It On The Mountain appears in the movie, and I hope it helps you get into the Christmas spirit.

Take your whole family and see it in theaters early, beginning November 2nd. All right, that is a message from Dallas Jenkins, an American film and TV director, writer and producer. His latest movie is The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, best known as the co-writer, executive producer of The Chosen, the first multi-season series about the life of Jesus.

And Jenkins' career is focused on Christian media, and this is a star-studded cast. Dallas, welcome. Are we ready to talk about Christmas? I'm ready to talk about Christmas. I'm excited. Are you? Not yet. For Christmas? No, I'm not excited. Not until after the election?

Yeah, or after Thanksgiving. Tell me what went into this. Well, I have been chasing the rights to this book for 20 years. The book is The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. It's a classic.

It's been around for 50 years. And when I read it 20 years ago to my kids, I was laughing. I appreciated the nostalgia. I love Christmas.

It's got a great story of how these bad kids from the wrong side of the tracks take over this town's Christmas pageant, and then, of course, because of their poverty, because of their outsider status, they're actually closer to the heart of the Jesus story and the birth of Christ than everyone else is. I get to the last chapter. I am crying so hard. I can't even see the pages.

My kids are looking at me funny. My wife takes the book from me. She starts reading it.

She starts crying. We're just passing it back and forth. So for well over 15 years, I was chasing the rights, trying to get it, and they had it set up with other studios and other directors. And finally, because of The Chosen, they finally believed I was ready and capable, and so I finally got the rights. So talking to you now about it, the fact that this movie's coming out soon, is a big dream come true. It comes out on November 8th? November 8th, nationwide, yep.

All right, so here's the trailer. Don't miss out. The annual Christmas pageant tickets are on sale now. They're advertising it on TV now? The pageant is an especially big deal this year. It's the 75th anniversary.

I want to give special mention to Grace for volunteering to direct it. You did what? Oh, no. Did somebody die? It's worse than that, son.

It's going to be the best Christmas pageant ever. Oh, no. It's the Hermans.

The Hermans are absolutely the worst kids in the history of the world. What'd they do now, dear? Break another window? Is that something on fire? Steal your lunch and then punch you for not having any candy? No.

Even worse. We're going to be in your Bible play. Herdmans in church.

Oh, boy. We take the pageant seriously. It's about community and tradition.

What do you all suggest? That I kick the Herdmans out of the church? Yes. So you have a great cast.

Judy Greer, Pete Holmes, Lauren Graham. It sounds like they were more than willing to jump in on this, correct? Yeah.

I mean, that's the thing. This story, even though, especially with me telling it, it focuses on the birth of Christ and the true meaning of Christmas, but even people who aren't necessarily traditional churchgoers have loved the book, loved the script. I think when Pete and Judy and Lauren Graham, who my kids are obsessed with from Gilmore Girls, read the script, they said they were crying as well. So we've seen that in early screenings. We've done many screenings around the country and just the response has been really incredible. So I think there's something about Christmas, something about the kind of the classic nature of telling that story, particularly when you can focus on the true meaning of it that kind of brings everyone together. So The Chosen, whose idea was that? I mean, there's been so many Jesus movies, but they have a series, this type of a claim. What made you feel as though The Chosen was the right time to release it, because clearly you were right.

Well, I don't know that I had all that big of a strategy for it. I remember I did a short film about the birth of Christ from the perspective of the shepherds for my church's Christmas Eve service, and I was coming off of a huge career failure. I didn't know that I would ever make another movie, so I did this little thing for my church. Very long story short, it went viral. I had the idea for a show.

There's been movies, like you said, there's been miniseries, but a multi-season show gives you the ability to kind of explore these stories even more, give some backstory, some context, fall in love with some of the characters. So I had that idea, but I didn't think anyone would do it. But that short film went viral.

We ended up doing it crowd funding to crowd fund the first season, shattered the all-time crowd funding record, raised over $10 million from 16,000 people, it was all crazy. So I don't think I'm necessarily strategic. I think I've just been following and listening and seeing how this thing has grown. But did you know you were capable of executing it so well? I mean, the acting, the acclaim it's received, I mean, for a story that most people know, to be able to do what you did is pretty sensational. Yeah, I mean, well, I certainly had no idea it was going to be this huge.

I don't think anybody did. I think it's just, like I said, I've been following. I think I'm a pretty good filmmaker. I don't think I'm this good to do a show that has had this kind of response all over the world.

But I think that sometimes when God does something and you get to be a part of it, you just hold on tight and you make sure that you're following and listening and doing your best. So when you talk to people in traditional Hollywood where you go to the traditional movie theater, I know everything's changing rapidly, but the Christian film was always niche. You see these huge numbers and these huge successes, but it never was off the mainstream. Is that changing when people see the box office? Is the perception changing? It really is changing. And I can tell you, Brian, I've been in this business for 25 years. I've been a consumer of it for longer.

I have never seen a time where more big time studios, the biggest streamers in the world, are actually pursuing this kind of content. I'm in the rooms. I'm having these meetings. In fact, I have another one today about wanting to do more Bible content. The Chosen, we're expanding our efforts. We're going to be doing more Bible stories rooted in this chosen universe. And the biggest studios in the world are excited and wanting to be involved.

I've never experienced that before. But I think that honestly, the fact that there's so many corporations involved in the studios now, and I say in some ways you can think of that as a negative, but actually it's a positive because they look at the numbers and they're not stupid and they go, if we want to actually make money and build our company, ignoring 50% of the country probably isn't a good idea. So with the Christmas pageant, with the best Christmas pageant ever that's rolling out beginning November 8th, is it in all the theaters or are you doing a slower rollout to build up? No, no, this is a mainstream Hollywood release. Lionsgate is doing a great job promoting it, getting it out there. As you saw at the beginning of our segment, Blake Shelton did an original song for it.

So this is not something that's just a niche little thing that we're doing. I mean, this is a mainstream release and hopefully a Christmas classic. Did your kids watch it?

Oh yeah. In fact, just the other day, one of my daughters saw it for the first time and she was crying and she just was, she was so excited about it and my kids are actually hard to please. They're not impressed by dad. So you'd think, oh, they'll just love everything I do, but they're actually the hardest ones to impress and they've been thrilled with it.

I mean, everyone who's seen it and the screenings, the response has been really great. All right. Dallas Jenkins, can't thank you enough.

Congratulations on all your success and hope to see you continue on that way. Yeah. Appreciate you, Brian. Thank you. Yeah.

Pick out the best Christmas pageant ever. All right. We'll come back with more, it looks like the fun has started and the campaign has begun for today. We'll give you an idea of where the candidates are going to be. Brian Kilmeade Show. You're with Brian Kilmeade. Pull up a chair and join me, Rachel Campos Duffy and me, former U.S. Congressman Sean Duffy, as we share our perspective on the discussions happening at kitchen tables across America. Download it from the kitchen table, the Duffy's at foxnewspodcast.com or wherever you download podcasts. Listen to the show ad free on Fox News Podcast Plus on Apple Podcast, Amazon Music with your prime membership or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.