In an interview with evangelical pastor Greg Laurie at an SoCal Harvest evangelical church event in Anaheim, California, Mel Gibson seemed to reveal what the title for the sequel to “The Passion of the Christ” would be.
“We’re talking about that,” Gibson said in response to a question about the project, which was revealed publicly for the first time in June. “Of course, that’s a huge undertaking, and it’s not The Passion 2 — it’s called The Resurrection.”
That seems to make sense.
“Of course, that’s a very big subject,” he continued. “And it needs to be looked at, because we don’t wanna do just a simple rendering of it. We can all read what happened, but in order to really experience and explore probably deeper meanings of what it’s about is gonna take some doing.”
The original Passion of the Christ was funded entirely by Gibson and his company Icon Productions, costing around $45 million for production and marketing. But it brought in $612 million worldwide, making it the most successful independent film ever, the highest grossing religious film ever, and the highest grossing R-rated film ever at the time.
Gibson is working on The Resurrection with Randall Wallace. The two previously worked together on Braveheart, for which Wallace was nominated for an Oscar for Best Screenplay and Gibson won Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture. Most recently, Wallace was writer and director for the Christian-themed Heaven Is For Real.
In June when the project was leaked, Wallace credited the evangelical Protestant community with pushing them to do a sequel. “The evangelical community considers The Passion the biggest movie ever out of Hollywood, and they kept telling us that they think a sequel will be even bigger.”
There is no timeline yet for when the movie might be made or released.
Here’s the interview with Gibson:
[See also: Musical Composer for “The Passion” Reveals He Suffered Satanic Attacks]
[See also: Jim Caviezel’s Stunning Testimony from Playing Jesus in “The Passion”]