Over four days last week, moviegoers paid just under $7.5 million to watch the first three episodes of a television show in a theater. It’s a show most of them could eventually watch for free. That’s the number behind a release strategy nobody in the streaming business had tried before: sending an entire season of The Chosen into theaters, in three staggered waves, before it reaches a single streaming app.
We’ve been covering this show since Issue 6, when it was a crowd-funded pilot nobody outside a small, devoted audience had heard of. The pattern since then has been one experiment after another in distribution — specials, early-access screenings, international rollouts — and Season 4 is the boldest version yet. Episodes 1 through 3 opened in theaters on February 1 for a two-week run; episodes 4 through 6 follow on February 15, and the final two close out the season on February 29, all through Fathom Events in the U.S. and Canada, with international audiences getting their own staggered release across Latin America, the UK, Poland, Australia, and New Zealand.
Dallas Jenkins first revealed the plan in September, telling fans the new season was “actually coming in theaters” months before any streaming date existed at all, a reversal of the usual order, where a theatrical run supplements a show rather than fronts it. By October, the studio had a trailer and a reason for the choice that went beyond marketing: prior one-off theatrical events for earlier seasons had sold well enough, repeatedly, that the team decided an entire season deserved the same treatment, rather than treating theaters as a novelty reserved for finales and premieres.
The season arrives at a heavier point in the story than anything the show has attempted. Jenkins has been telling press since October that audiences should expect sorrow this time, not just suspense — the narrative is moving into the stretch of the Gospels where Jesus’s own grief becomes part of the story, as Jerusalem turns away from him and his closest followers still don’t fully understand what’s coming. That tonal shift is part of what makes the theatrical bet interesting: a studio asking an audience to pay for tickets to watch a story get harder to watch.
It’s also, inevitably, a financial bet with plenty at stake for a production that has never had a conventional studio behind it. The Chosen remains funded primarily through its own crowdfunding model, now in its fourth season of asking the same audience that buys tickets to also help pay for the production itself. A four-day opening weekend of $7.5 million for a biblical drama’s first three episodes is not a number any studio executive would have predicted five years ago, when the show was still explaining itself to one donor at a time. It is also not, by itself, proof that an entire TV season can be a theatrical business model rather than a one-time stunt. Two more theatrical windows remain before the season even reaches a streaming device, and the real test of the strategy is whether audiences keep showing up in week three the way they did in week one.
What the opening weekend does confirm is something this magazine has argued since our first interview with Jenkins: that an audience built slowly, through genuine fandom rather than algorithmic discovery, behaves differently than a typical streaming audience. It shows up in person. It brings people. A show built on crowdfunding and churches and group texts turned out to be exactly the kind of show that could get people into a theater in February to watch television.
We’ll be watching how the next two theatrical windows perform, and where Season 4 eventually lands once it does reach streaming — a question the studio itself hadn’t answered as of this week. For a show that started as an experiment in whether anyone would pay to help make a series about Jesus, the experiment keeps finding new forms. This time, the experiment is whether anyone will pay to watch one in a theater, in installments, months before they have to.