The Chosen: Last Supper, the first installment of Season 5, opened in theaters Thursday and pulled in $11.4 million over its opening weekend, the best theatrical debut this show has ever had. It landed third nationally for the weekend, behind two wide studio releases, which is itself worth sitting with: a biblical drama built from donor funding and church small groups outdrew nearly everything else in American theaters that week. The franchise’s total theatrical gross now sits above $80 million, and two more installments of this same season are still to come.
We’ve followed this show’s distribution experiments closely, from the first crowd-funded season to last year’s unprecedented decision to send the entirety of Season 4 into theaters before it streamed anywhere. Season 5 pushes the strategy further still: three separate theatrical parts spread across a four-week run in the U.S. and Canada, with an international rollout beginning two weeks later across more than forty countries, and a streaming premiere not expected until summer. Every stage of that rollout is now, in effect, its own box-office event, and Part One just posted the kind of number that makes the remaining two feel like appointments rather than formalities.
The timing of the story being told only raises what’s at stake. Last Supper, as its title makes plain, is built around the events of Jesus’s final night with his disciples — the meal, the betrayal already in motion, the washing of feet, and the arrest that follows — alongside the triumphal entry and the temple confrontations that precede it. Dallas Jenkins has described this as the biggest production the show has ever mounted, with a scope he has compared favorably to nothing else in the show’s run, and the press rollout matched that ambition: key art for the season was shot by Annie Leibovitz and unveiled at a press event in Times Square in mid-February, a level of visual production the show’s earlier, scrappier seasons never had the budget to attempt.
Reviews backed up what the box office suggested. Audiences logged a 99% score on Rotten Tomatoes and rated the film 9.1 out of 10 on IMDb, numbers more typical of a beloved franchise entry than a mid-run TV season stretched into a theatrical release. That reception matters for a production whose previous theatrical debuts opened far smaller, generally in the $3 million to $9 million range. Part One didn’t just outperform those earlier runs; it suggested the audience for this show in a theater has grown alongside the audience for it at home, rather than splitting off from it.
What hasn’t changed is who is paying for all of it. The show remains funded primarily through donor support rather than a traditional studio budget, which makes an opening weekend like this one function as more than an entertainment headline. It’s closer to a financial report. Every dollar spent on a ticket for Part One is also, indirectly, a vote of confidence in a production model that has no network backing it and no guaranteed renewal if the numbers ever stop climbing. Three years ago, in Issue 6, we described this show’s funding as an open question nobody could answer yet. $80 million in cumulative box office later, across a franchise still relying on audience goodwill rather than studio capital, the question has mostly answered itself.
There’s also a simpler read of the weekend, separate from any of the business analysis: audiences chose, in large numbers, to spend a Thursday night and a weekend watching the story of the Last Supper rendered with more craft and care than this production has ever had access to before. The two parts still ahead will cover ground this show has been building toward since its first season — the arrest, the trial, the crucifixion that Season 4 already warned viewers would be heavier than anything before it. If Part One’s opening is any indication, audiences aren’t just willing to watch that story unfold in a theater. They’re willing to show up three separate times to see all of it.