If you head out to movie theaters this weekend, you’re likely to see The Chosen on the marquee.
The TV show, a historical drama based on the life of Jesus, is rolling out its fourth season theatrically, two episodes at a time, over the next month, before dropping in its entirely on apps and streaming platforms. If the strategy sounds different, well, so is almost everything else about this series and its subsequent success. What began as a crowd-funded project, created by Dallas Jenkins, has now been seen by more than 200 million people around the world, thanks to distributors like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Peacock, the CW and The Chosen app.
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Brad Pelo, whose prior career highlights include stints as CEO of both i.TV and Ancestry.com, was so impressed by what Jenkins was building, he came aboard to help fuel its growth. He hopped on the phone with The Hollywood Reporter in late January to talk about the unique ways in which the series has engaged its fans, the future of The Chosen-verse and why a TV show needs its own president.
You’ve worn a lot of hats in your career — what drew you to this?
My career started in tech, but 20 years ago I transitioned into developing tech businesses around television specifically. Then, when COVID happened, like most of the world, I started binge-watching shows and I saw The Chosen and was really taken by it. Honestly, I just never conceived of a show about Jesus that could be a true historical drama. I’m one who’s shied away from the category of Christian media, both as a consumer and a creator. It just didn’t resonate with me. But when I saw what Dallas was doing with The Chosen, it was this epiphany, like, why have faith people been so stuck on evangelizing faith rather than just telling great historical stories? And that’s what Dallas has done. So, I reached out to him and introduced myself — not to get a job, just to say, “Hey, how can I help you succeed at this project?” And he gave me a couple of assignments, things he was stuck on, and I helped him out for a bit.
What were some of those early assignments?
The first was he needed a set. The first season had been filmed on a farm, and he just didn’t have a 1st century set. I happened to know about a set in Utah. I’d spent a good part of my career there, so I reached out to the church that had built this set in the deserts of Utah and negotiated a lease for The Chosen. That was my first assignment, and I passed. The other assignments were, like, help us with our then distribution partner, Angel Studios, so I spent a bit of time with Angel, and helped us with staffing what was then a nascent studio. And within a year, I was in, full-time, with The Chosen as its president and executive producer.
TV shows don’t typically have presidents. What does the role entail?
Most television shows, as you know, are attached to a studio property. We’re independent. So, we’ve been in this hybrid place where we are both a show as well as our own studio. And as a result, there are a lot of business functions beyond the physical production that have to be performed. We do our own marketing. For many years, we did our own distribution. What we look like today would be, in Hollywood terms, and oversized production team or an undersized mini studio. It’s like we’re in that in-between stage because we only have one show right now. But that will change. We will be launching additional shows and we’ll begin to look more like a studio-studio. Again, a small studio, but we expect to remain independent while working with Hollywood partners. Lionsgate now represents us in our licensing worldwide, and there will be other partners that we’ll announce probably later this year.
Where do you see the real growth opportunities?
Well, when I got here, it was really a matter of keeping the wheels on the bus while we were growing. That’s a big challenge all by itself. We had to build our own backlot. So, in addition to the set that we use in Utah, we’ve built a backlot in Texas. We have two full-size soundstages and a biblical village built on a lake that acts as a fishing village. We now have a $50 million facility. And also, aspirationally, of course, we want to grow beyond the story we’re telling. So, there are things in development around future projects, and that means attracting new creatives to the team — writers, showrunners, people to help build out the future of what we will eventually become. But also, just managing the growth of the current series because since it is independent, a lot of the things that a studio would normally take on, we have to advance ourselves. So, for example, we just had a big L.A. premiere and a London premiere and tonight we’ll have a Poland premiere. These are all things that a studio normally would handle.
And instead, your team is?
Yes, we’re out there with our own team doing those things. And because The Chosen has become its own kind of cultural phenomena, it almost feels like a movement — and I don’t mean that in a religious sense, I mean that in a kind of cultural sense. We just had an audience study done that shows us that barely half of our audience are practicing Christians. So, the other half are simply a secular audience that has found a historical drama with heart. And that’s exactly what we’re creating: a historical drama with heart that brings hope, and we see ourselves in the characters that are being portrayed. Obviously, none of us see ourselves as Jesus, and that’s not the purpose of the show. It’s to tell the stories of the people around. Now, the burden of it is figuring out how to manage the growth from a business perspective without stifling the general euphoria and enthusiasm of the fans and even of the industry players who would love to catch a little bit of what we’ve got. So, it’s about figuring out the right way to work within the industry, while keeping the specialness of what our independence has allowed us to do.
You just referenced this idea of Hollywood entities wanting to catch some of this wave, and as you look at the list of all the distributors, you get a sense of that. How do you navigate where The Chosen gets rolled out and when?
At this point, there are a couple things that are important to us. One is while we’ll maintain our autonomy creatively, we are not jealous of control when it comes to delivery — the distribution pieces of all of this, or even the marketing pieces of it. So, what we would like to see in future relationships are parties who can work alongside us in a studio/distributor kind of a relationship but looking at our brand and audience as a unique opportunity to move beyond the stereotypes of Christian media. We just sort of bristle every time someone calls this a faith show.
You’d prefer…?
It’s a historical drama about a character who happens to be a faith personality — no more than you would think of The Crown as the royalty genre. So, with that in mind, as we look for partners, we’re not really looking for people who want to capture the faith community; that really isn’t of interest. We know the faith community makes up a significant part of our audience, but we really see ourselves as biblical storytellers and, similar to any tome of stories, think of it as Marvel comic books that we’ve had for generations, we see the Bible as a literary library that has really never been approached from the perspective of historical drama. It’s been approached from either evangelism or what I’ll call all kind of epic storytelling, like these significant moments in history, a Cecil B. DeMille Ten Commandments sort of thing. But we never really get to know the characters. We don’t get in their lives. And in the world today, where serial drama is what we’re consuming, why wouldn’t we go back to this historical text that we’ve had for millennia and start telling these stories differently? And that’s our mission. So, our partners need to see the opportunity there without niche-ing us in the process.
Give me an example of how that’s worked successfully with a partner thus far.
Sure. So Lionsgate, as our commercial distributor, bringing us to television and streaming services around the world. In the early days, seasons one and two, we worked with a startup distributor called Angel Studios, and their view of the world was we should deliver this content via an app, and let’s grow an audience around a new ecosystem. Kind of like, let’s be a new streamer. And that was very, very confining. So, a year and a half ago, we terminated that relationship with them as our distributor and signed up with Lionsgate with a charter to say, “Treat us like a normal television show. Bring us where you bring other television shows and let’s see how that works.” And they have been a great partner. They caught the vision of what we were trying to do and brought us into the CW, for example, and it’s a great example. You would not think of The CW ever putting out faith media, but they were able to show The CW, this is not a faith show, this is a drama that will attract an audience. And sure enough, it worked. We became the number one drama on CW this last summer and season three of our show had a 50 percent lift over season one. It just grew and grew and grew over the summer. On the consumer side, the audience side, our main partners domestically have been Netflix, Amazon and Peacock, and each of them have approached the show a little differently, and we’re learning with them what works.
So, what have you learned from each?
While I’ll say that the largest audience for the show has been derived by Netflix, and I think that’s just by virtue of them being the biggest, with Amazon, in those very first few weeks after they launched it, we saw them willingly merchandising the show as if it was one of their own shows. Most licensed properties don’t get that treatment. And within the first two weeks there, our show became in the top three on Amazon, and then that just caught a tailwind, and for the next 100 days, we were in the top 10 of everything on Prime. So, the variance there was they invested just a little bit of their own marketing, or on platform merchandising, to see if it would work, and it did. Peacock, to give you another example, was an early believer in the show. Peacock actually took season one of the show a couple years ago, and it performed incredibly well for them. And that not only gave us some confidence that it would play to a broader audience, but it performed well enough that they’ve continued to license each season. So, I think our experience with each of those partners, again, we’re licensees, so it’s not as though we have intimacy in those relationships, but as we move forward into the future, some of that might change. We’ll see.
You mentioned that roughly half the audience was secular. Is that data coming from just those who watch it on The Chosen app, or is that across the streaming landscape?
That’s across the landscape. Only a minority of people actually watch the show on The Chosen App itself. The top source is Netflix, followed by Amazon, Peacock and the CW. The Chosen app represents only eight percent. Now, that’s only true since we left our relationship with Angel. So, a year and a half ago, it would’ve been the vast majority of people were watching it on the app. But it took us four years to grow to a 100 million viewers; and last year alone, we added another 100 million.
Jesus. No pun intended.
Exactly. (Laughs)
So, you’re about to launch the fourth season in theaters. Is that a marketing play or an effort to bring in new viewers?
The new viewership is a consequence. It’s not the intention of our theatrical releasing.
What is the intention?
To serve our fan base. We tested this a year ago where we put out the first episode of season three in theaters, and it did well with very little marketing, mostly just internal marketing. I think we did 15 million with that episode. And we went back out to the audience and what we heard back was they loved the sense of community in watching this kind of a show — most theatrical experiences it’s bang ‘em ups or blow ’em ups or you’re cheering for the villain or the hero. This is experiential. This is sitting and living through the lives of others. And I’ve just come from a few big premieres, and what I found is unlike normal Hollywood premieres, we filled those theaters with fans. Fans bought $100 tickets to go to a premiere. So, you’re sitting there, and yeah, you’ve got a couple hundred seats that are made up of press and industry folks, but your audience is also sitting there and your experience with that audience is really breathtaking. I had many press and industry people say after the L.A. premiere that they’ve never experienced that in theater before. That was the discovery for us. We said, “Well, wait a minute, our fans want to watch this together.” If you have an opportunity to go to a theater, you’ll see it.
What does it look like, exactly?
The fans come dressed in Chosen gear, and they arrive early and they hang around after, introducing themselves to each other. And they’re very active in the viewing experience, emotionally. I mean, you hear them respond, whether that’s a laugh or a gasp, but it’s very engaged. So that’s what it’s about: community. If it were just about marketing or revenue, we would open the tail of these releases and just let them run as long as we can make money. But we’re not, we’re very specifically saying, “We’re going to run these in two-week slots. We’re going to let people come experience it if they choose to, and then we’ll release it on streaming platforms.”
I have to ask, what does Chosen gear entail?
It’s everything from t-shirts and hoodies to beanies and books and socks. If you go to The Chosen gift shop, you’ll see.
Got it. I didn’t know if they were going dressed as characters from the show itself.
No, no, it’s fan gear.
You’ve taken a different approach than a traditional Hollywood production when it comes to marketing and fan engagement. Of all of your efforts, which have surprised you most in their success?
I’m going to give you the secret sauce. It’s not only about creating great content, but also involving the audience on this journey. And this is something that our co-founder — Dallas, of course, is the creative, but Derral Eves is a mastermind at audience development. And from day one, they approached this as, “We’re going to engage the audience a year before they ever see the first episode of this series.” It started with the crowdfunding. So, if you want to see this kind of media made, help support it. The other brilliant thing that these two founders did was they saw the audience as not just consumers of this content, but participants. So, three years ago, they invited 2,500 fans to come to the set in 1st century costumes that they had to make themselves and participate in the filming of a large scene, which was the Sermon on the Mount. The next year, it was the feeding of the 5,000. And we actually had 12,000 people show up for the feeding of the 5,000. We shot that over three days, with all these fans coming together to be a part of it. And this last year, we had a whole week of fan days where 500 people a day came in costume and were cast as extras to participate in the show. That level of engagement culminated in something we held last fall, an insider event.
You’re referring to Chosen-Con, yes?
Yes, not unlike Comic-Con. That’s where actually people did show up in 1st century garb — not everybody, but a subsection of them. And the cast was all there, and it was just a full-on lovefest. I mean, 3,600 people showed up, and those tickets sold out in less than 48 hours. We maxed out the venue. This year, we’ll have a much larger venue. But if you’ve been to a Comic-Con, you could think of this as a Comic-Con but really in-depth about just one show. And it ran over two days and was just a beautiful fan engagement event. So, that’s different about the way we do it. And again, we can do that because of our independence — we can invest deeply in the fan engagement around just one show. It’s much harder for a studio to do that because they’re sort of playing the averages across the portfolio. But we’re going deep, and it’s our belief, if you want to think of it in business terms, that as we build out the audience around this show, that there’ll be a ready audience for the next biblical story we tell.
