Are there too many Jesus movies?

The phenomenon of “twin movies”—two or more films with strikingly similar plots or subject matter released in close proximity—is almost as old as Hollywood itself. I remember a remarkable string of them in the 1990s (among others, two 1993 Wyatt Earp movies, two talking-piglet family films in 1994/95, and three 1997 volcano disaster movies).

Two Jesus movies in the same year, then, may not be all that surprising — but what about two or even three sets of twin Jesus productions, for a total of six productions in a single year? 2025 has to be some kind of record!

In March and April, moviegoing fans of Dallas Jenkins’s powerhouse franchise The Chosen were baffled by screening options for two productions both named for the Last Supper. The one they wanted, The Chosen – Last Supper, was a three-part Fathom Entertainment release, but an unrelated faith-based movie, confusingly also called The Last Supper, was also in theaters.

There were also a pair of animated life-of-Christ movies. In April Angel Studios distributed The King of Kings, a computer-animated Jesus movie ostensibly based on Charles Dickens’s posthumously published The Life of Our Lord. Then in September came Light of the World, a hand-drawn animated take on Jesus’ life seen through the eyes of a very young John son of Zebedee.

Finally, two very different 2025 movies might be said to offer genre angles on infancy-narrative material—though that’s misleadingly ambiguous. Matthew’s infancy narrative is a main source for Zero A. D., a faith-based Angel Studios thriller arriving just before Christmas and focusing particularly on Herod the Great and the slaughter of the innocents. The other film, The Carpenter’s Son, finds fodder for horror in the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas; at this writing no firm date has been set, but it’s planned for this fall.