A biblical ‘acid trip': Mel Gibson's plan to resurrect The Passion of the Christ

Telegraph

24-04-2025

So, it has risen. Mel Gibson will, indeed, be making a sequel to his most notorious film, The Passion of the Christ, this August. After years of speculation, it has been announced by Manuela Cacciamani, the CEO of Rome's Cinecitta Studios, that the picture will be filmed there in the summer of 2025, and that various locations around the rural south of Italy will be used, as they were for his original 2004 picture.
While Gibson himself has not confirmed the shooting schedule, it seems near-certain, after years of speculation, that this most-anticipated – and most dreaded – biopic has finally come to pass. And not before time, in the estimation of many.
When we consider the most violent mainstream films ever made, we might talk about slasher pictures or Holocaust horrors, but Mel Gibson's decidedly gritty crucifixion film has to take the (sacramental) biscuit. Released on February 25 2004 in the United States, at a time when Gibson was both an Oscar-winning director and an A-list celebrity, it was remarkable both for the level of violence contained within it and for its dedication to presenting the Biblical passion narrative of the final days of Christ with as much accuracy as might be imagined.
Despite starring such well-known actors as Jim Caviezel and Monica Bellucci, it was decidedly non-commercial in approach; the dialogue was wholly in Aramaic, the directorial approach owed more to Pasolini's The Gospel According to St Matthew than to the more anodyne Jesus of Nazareth or The Greatest Story Ever Told, and it was uncompromisingly horrible.
The venerable critic Roger Ebert – who knew what he was talking about – called it 'the most violent film I have ever seen' – and even veterans of horror pictures cavilled at the sheer level of ghastliness on screen, which saw Caviezel's Jesus being flayed so graphically that bits of flesh flew off his body as he was scourged. Gibson was unrepentant, saying in contemporary interviews: 'It is very violent. You're watching a man being tortured to death, but as lyrically and as beautifully as I can film it. I hope (my method) allows audiences to stay there and experience it.'
And, undeniably, it's a technically extraordinary piece of cinema. With the great Caleb Deschanel as cinematographer, and production design that attempts as far as possible to recreate the art of Caravaggio on screen, it's as successful an attempt at recapturing the ancient world on screen as can be imagined. Much as I rate Martin Scorsese's brilliant Last Temptation of Christ, it seems almost milquetoast compared to Gibson's full-strength offering.
Although Gibson was accused of anti-Semitism – something of a consistent issue in his life and career – for the portrayal of the Jewish high priest Caiaphas, who declares at one point that the blood of Christ 'should be on us and on our children', the film played very well to its base. The Christian Right in the United States were rapturous when it came to the picture, helped by the reported words of Pope John Paul: 'it is as it was.'
Many churches organised busloads of outings to the R-rated picture. It grossed an extraordinary $612 million from a $30 million budget – almost entirely funded by Gibson himself – and it led to a revival in Christian-themed films, many of which have been successful at the US box office.
Most recently, the animated picture The King of Kings, which is a far more conventional account of the life and death of Christ, has grossed nearly $50 million, almost entirely in America, and faith-based films continue to attract wide audiences, who are drawn to the uplifting, evangelical messages contained therein.
Yet for all the success of such pictures, many have wondered why the Citizen Kane of this sub-genre has not had a follow-up. Admittedly, since the release of The Passion of the Christ, Gibson himself has suffered his own reputational difficulties, which have resulted in his career screeching to a halt not once but twice.
The defiant success of his Second World War film Hacksaw Ridge, which saw him nominated for Best Director at the Oscars, appeared to restore him to the A-list, but since then he has been struggling to return to his former prominence as a film-maker. His latest film, the Mark Wahlberg vehicle Flight Risk, spluttered to an unexceptional $44 million, only just covering its $25 million budget. Many might have assumed that any further Christ pictures remain as dead and buried as his martyred protagonist.
However, few films make over $600 million at the box office without someone, somewhere, believing that the audience is going to come back for a repeat. The steady stream of interest in faith-based films has meant that Gibson is now in an excellent position to make the sequel that he has been talking about for the best part of two decades. And, to be frank, it sounds wild. As far back as 2016, he was talking about reuniting with his Braveheart screenwriter Randall Wallace for a follow-up, entitled The Passion of the Christ: Resurrection.
Unsurprisingly, given that the previous film had ended at the precise moment that Jesus rose from the dead – leading unkind and irreverent commentators to call it 'the most serious zombie movie ever made' – there was the obvious potential to explore what happened after the stone covering Christ's tomb was rolled away. But what does Gibson have in mind?
Since his return to Hollywood, the director has clearly been thinking about the sequel, but in 2023 he seemed undecided as to which route he would take. Acknowledging that it would be a 'massive undertaking', he mentioned two distinct screenplays. 'One of them is [a] very structured and very strong script and kind of more what should expect and the other is like an acid trip,' he explained. 'Because you're going into other realms and stuff. I mean you're in hell and you're watching the angels fall. It's like crazy.'
Given that Flight Risk is by far the most conventional film Gibson has ever directed – and, judging by its indifferent critical and commercial reception, his least successful – few would blame him for opting for the latter, and this, by all accounts, is where he's gone.
Speaking to Joe Rogan this January, Gibson said: 'I'm hoping next year sometime. There's a lot required because it's an acid trip. I've never read anything like it. My brother [Donal] and I and Randall all sort of congregated on this. So there's some good heads put together, but there's some crazy stuff. And I think in order to really tell the story properly you have to really start with the fall of the angels, which means you're in another place, you're in another realm. You need to go to hell. You need to go to Sheol.'
Someone who has experienced his own fall from grace might be uniquely placed to offer this particular insight, but veteran Gibson observers would be unsurprised by anything that he has said. And so the return of the committed Christian Caviezel as Jesus – who, apparently, will be de-aged by CGI techniques similar to those used on Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in The Irishman – is obviously a necessity. Caviezel, who has largely eschewed mainstream film-making of late, is committed to a return. 'I'm not acting as Jesus,' he said recently. 'I'm asking Him to work through me.'
And Gibson has his own ideas as to depict Christ's sojourn in Hell, saying last year: 'So it's like, you know, I have ways of dealing with that, because, you know, 20 years ago is [supposed to be] three days later. So it has its own peculiar set of problems, which I think I can solve.'
If and when the film begins production, it will be a sombre affair, a far cry from Gibson's previous reputation as a joker on set. Caviezel has said that he will be receiving Holy Communion on a daily basis while filming, and that he will be taking influence from C.S. Lewis's classic religious text The Screwtape Letters, which he has called enormously important for him personally: 'I'm not a sheep,' he has said. 'I was a wolf who's been changed.'
The Resurrection of the Christ (as it's now called) may be anticipated with a mixture of disdain and trepidation by the Hollywood cognoscenti and film critics alike. Yet Gibson has not made his career, and fortune, by failing to understand his audience, and what they want. This could yet be every bit as big as the first film – and if it is, it will represent a resurrection nearly as impressive as that of Christ's for its flawed but brilliant creator.