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Axios
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Axios
What's next for faith-based studio Wonder Project
Kelly Merryman Hoogstraten, the Austin-based CEO of Wonder Project, is on a mission to create television and movies for a global faith-based audience. Driving the news: Wonder Project premiered its debut series "House of David" on Prime Video on Feb. 27. The series tells the ascent of the biblical figure David, who becomes king of Israel. "House of David" garnered 22 million viewers in its first 17 days, according to Wonder Project, and Prime Video has renewed the show for a second season. The final episode was released April 3. We chatted with Merryman Hoogstraten about "House of David" and what's next for Wonder Project. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. What's been the most surprising reaction so far to the premiere of "House of David?" "This story touches everybody in some way. ... There's something that I love, that my husband loves. I have younger kids, but a lot of my friends that have older kids say, 'I just sat down and had a conversation with my son or my daughter about fear being the thief, and I wouldn't have expected to have that conversation.' There's something very special about opening up conversations." This is Wonder Project's first release. Why was "House of David" the right story to lead with? " Our founder, Jon Erwin, has wanted to tell this story. He and his father went to Jerusalem when he was 16 years old, and he felt a connection to David's story at that moment, and has always wanted to tell a story, and started writing versions of this story 10 or 15 years ago." Do you think there's been a shift in how audiences are consuming faith-based content? "I think one of the things that's happened over the course of the last few years is that there have been a number of films and TV series that have come out, whether that's ' The Chosen ' or ' Jesus Revolution ' or ' Sound of Freedom,' that gave you a sense that this is a broad story that lots of people are interested in." What's next for Wonder Project? More faith-oriented content? "Our mission is to tell courageous stories that restore faith and things worth believing. I love this idea of restoring faith, and that can be in God, but it can also be in country and in family and entrepreneurs and coaches and teachers. We produced a film last year that will be theatrically released by Amazon in Q4 this year called ' Sarah's Oil,' and it's a wonderful story about one of the first Black female millionaires — and she happens to be an 11-year-old girl. ... We also are working alongside Sony TriStar on a film with Nate Bargatze. Amazon greenlit a second series called ' It's Not Like That.'" What role does Austin play in the Wonder Project's production and growth? "I like to say that much of the faith audience lives in the heartland, and we really believe in the heartland values. I think Texas is a great place to be immersed in that.
Wall Street Journal
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
TV and Movies for America's Vast Middle
Grapevine, Texas I grew up in the 1970s and '80s. My conception of life in the adult world was formed to a great extent by television and movies. As a teenager I didn't have much in the way of insight, but I did notice one difference between my own experience and the world portrayed on screen: In the worlds of 'Happy Days,' 'The Jeffersons,' 'Three's Company' 'Family Ties' and a thousand other shows and movies, religion had no place, except occasionally as an object of ridicule. No character in these productions, or none I recall, expressed a serious thought about God or faith or religious practice or doctrinal leaning. Millions of Americans for whom religious belief is a normal part of life learned to accept this absence. But it felt unnatural. Based in New York and Los Angeles, America's entertainment industry has long ignored the interests and worldviews of ordinary religious people in the country's vast middle. That has begun to change. Technological improvements—roughly from the development of the digital camera to the rise of streaming platforms—have enabled independent filmmakers across the country to produce high-quality movies and series that explore themes mainstream studios don't understand and prefer to ignore. That's the supply side. The demand side is ready for new stuff. That there are enormous numbers of American viewers who will pay to watch well-made films that avoid gratuitous crudity and sacrilege and present religious sentiment as typically human was made evident by the unpredicted success of 'Sound of Freedom,' the 2023 movie starring Jim Caviezel as a former government agent whose belief in God leads him to rescue children from sex traffickers. It was distributed by the Provo, Utah-based Angel Studios and took in $250.5 million in gross revenue against a $14.5 million budget. Two of the most talented filmmakers in this burgeoning field are the brothers Jon and Andrew Erwin. Their films aren't 'Christian' in any didactic or proselytizing sense. Erwin movies are what might be termed faith-adjacent. Their films' protagonists, like most people in most places at all times in human history, respond to life's blows by turning to God for aid and direction. 'American Underdog,' a 2021 movie about Kurt Warner, the quarterback who didn't make the NFL draft but eventually led the St. Louis Rams to a Super Bowl victory, is as well-acted and skillfully filmed as any Hollywood sports movie. The Erwin brothers' 'Jesus Revolution,' starring Kelsey Grammer and Jonathan Roumie, is a sympathetic but not uncritical account of Southern California's 'Jesus people' movement of the late 1960s and '70s. 'Jesus Revolution' grossed $54 million against a $15 million production budget. Jon Erwin's latest venture is a streaming series released on Amazon on Feb. 27: 'House of David,' a dramatic adaptation of the life of Israel's second and greatest king, co-directed by Mr. Erwin and Jon Gunn. The first season was filmed in Greece last year under the auspices of the Wonder Project, a new company headed by Mr. Erwin and former Netflix executive Kelly Merryman Hoogstraten. 'I've been dreaming of telling the story of David since I was 16 years old,' Mr. Erwin, 42, says in an interview at the Gaylord Texan hotel, where the National Religious Broadcasters are hosting their annual conference. As a young boy, Mr. Erwin traveled to Israel with his father. 'He bought me my first camera, the best gift I've ever had. We made this walk-and-talk documentary. It was just the two of us, and we went to all the holy sites.' What he remembers most is going to the tomb of David in Jerusalem. 'Right there, my imagination started turning.' In our conversation he refers to himself as an 'artist,' and the term isn't amiss—'House of David' is a superb piece of filmmaking. But apart from the black ring on his left hand, there's no outward sign Mr. Erwin is a creative type at all. No tattoos, no oddball eyeglass frames or retro attire, just close-cropped light brown hair, ordinary jacket and chinos. His filmmaking debut, he says, came when he was 15 and somebody was short a cameraman at a University of Alabama football game: 'Some guy got sick and they needed a replacement. That's how I got into this industry.' With each of his previous films, Mr. Erwin says, he has been 'trying to get good enough at the craft to take on what I consider the Mount Everest of stories,' the epic of David. He's right to revere that story. The biblical Book of Samuel, where most of David's story is told—I and II and Samuel in modern Bibles—is a masterpiece: an epic history of the origins of Israel's monarchy and of the rise, near-fall and restoration of Israel's greatest king; a political-philosophical treatise on the necessity and dangers of human government; and a model of stylistic efficiency, thematic unity and unsparing realism. 'The story of David,' the Hebrew scholar Robert Alter writes in his 1999 commentary on the Book of Samuel, 'is probably the greatest single narrative representation in antiquity of a human life evolving by slow stages through time, shaped and altered by the pressures of political life, public institutions, family, the impulses of body and spirit, the eventual sad decay of the flesh.' I have felt for many years that the story of David is ripe for cinematic treatment. But I worried that any attempt by a Hollywood studio to dramatize it would ride roughshod over the Book of Samuel's beautifully constructed narrative and extract from it 21st-century social-political messages that aren't there. Mr. Erwin can be trusted not to commit those errors, believing as he does—readers may agree or disagree—that the text is revelatory of God's character. He grew up in a churchgoing family in Birmingham, Ala., and like many Protestants of a conservative bent was made to read the Bible cover to cover and memorize large parts of it. When Mr. Erwin was 6 or 7, a Sunday school teacher promised to take any student who memorized a stack of verses to an amusement park. 'I wanted to go to Six Flags,' he says. 'I memorized them all. And I went.' Thus began a life of scriptural study and memorization. I'm not surprised, then, watching 'House of David,' to note the care with which it treats biblical texts. The series contains plenty of dramatic material not in the Bible—the Hebrew histories are famously laconic, and any screen adaptation would require narrative supplements—but nothing in the biblical text is substantively changed. The extrabiblical story lines, moreover, consist of interpretations of, not deviations from, the text. One example: In the Bible, when the prophet Samuel visits David's home and asks his father, Jesse, to gather all his sons, he calls only seven of the eight—for reasons not specified in the text. Jesse is forced by the prophet to call the eighth and youngest, the shepherd David, from the fields. Why is the father ashamed of the boy? In 'House of David,' Mr. Erwin has interpreted verses from two Davidic Psalms—'I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me' (51:5) and 'I have become a stranger to my brothers, an alien to my mother's sons' (69:8)—to speculate that David was the son of a non-Hebrew mother whom his father married after the death of his first wife. There is no record of such a union, but the scenario would explain the contempt with which David's eldest brother, Eliab, treats him when he arrives to hear Goliath taunting the Israelite army (I Samuel 17:28). Everything in the show is not in the Bible, Mr. Erwin acknowledges more than once, but he insists 'everything in the Bible is in the show. We talked to theologians and historians and rabbinic scholars. In the end, the goal of the thing was to create a great TV show.' Which, in my view, it is. And I'm not alone. 'House of David' debuted at No. 8 on Variety's streaming original charts, behind the second season of '1923' and the third of 'Reacher' but ahead of 'Landman.' Since I spoke to Mr. Erwin just before its release in late February, 'House of David' has done well enough to merit a second season. He is back in Greece filming it now. Meanwhile, the finale of its first season—in which the young shepherd encounters the massive warrior Goliath in the Valley of Elah (I Samuel 17)—appeared on Thursday. I wonder if the success of the Erwin brothers' films, and of other faith-adjacent productions generally, signifies some broader cultural shift: a new openness to unironic virtue, perhaps, or a discontent with stories that studiously ignore the sacred. 'There is a longing for content that, as I like to say, restores faith in things worth believing in,' Mr. Erwin says. 'Things you can watch with your kids or your parents. If you think about what that screen'—he gestures to a nearby wall-mounted television—'when it first came out, it was something that gathered everybody around it. 'I Love Lucy,' Andy Griffith, Carol Burnett. It gave multiple generations a common experience, and typically that common experience left you feeling you could aspire to a better version of yourself.' Mr. Erwin repudiates any suggestion that movies, TV shows and documentaries—'content,' to use his bloodless word, for which alas there is no convenient synonym—must be morally disinfected or artificially wholesome. 'House of David,' like the biblical story on which it's based, is full of envy, violence, lust and strife. But its hero is—here I have to use dated language—a clean and upright man. Mr. Erwin points me to remarks recently delivered by Vince Gilligan, creator of 'Breaking Bad,' the AMC series (2008-13) featuring one of the great antiheroes of modern television: the onetime school teacher, later meth dealer and all-around crime lord Walter White. 'For decades, we made the villains too sexy,' Mr. Gilligan said on receiving an award from the Writers Guild of America. 'Maybe what the world needs now are some good old-fashioned Greatest Generation-types who give more than they take—who think that kindness, tolerance and sacrifice aren't strictly for chumps.' Mr. Erwin thinks of his work as in some way supplying newer, nobler heroes. 'In my career, I can't recall a moment like this, when these types of resources are being given to creators like me'—that is, to filmmakers telling biblical and faith-adjacent stories—'in a way that allows us to keep creative control. It really is an amazing moment.' Two items make me think Mr. Erwin might be on to something about this cultural 'moment' we're in. First, 'Anora' won five Academy Awards on March 2, including best picture and best director. The movie is about a tough-minded stripper and prostitute—sex worker, to use the current term. A finely crafted film, I gather, but hardly one that can, as Mr. Erwin might put it, attract a multigenerational audience. That the major Hollywood-based studios have declined in both revenue and cultural influence over the past decade is, perhaps, not so hard to explain. Second, a Pew Research study published last month concluded that the share of Americans identifying as Christian has held more or less steady for the past five years, halting—'at least for now,' as the study says—a decades-long decline. Is America poised for a resurgence in religious belief? If so, I have to think 'content' creators like Mr. Erwin will find themselves in the center of it. In the meantime, Mr. Erwin offers the simple hope that his biblical adaptation will spur viewers to read the book on which it's based, rather as Peter Jackson's 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy persuaded many of its viewers to read J.R.R. Tolkien's original. 'I remember when some Amazon executives read the scripts for 'House of David' for the first time,' Mr. Erwin recalls. 'They said, These are really good. I said, It's based on a best-seller, man. Five billion copies sold. It's a good book. You should check it out.' Mr. Swaim is an editorial page writer for the Journal.
Los Angeles Times
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘House of David' isn't just a religious show, exec producers say. It's ‘a war of houses'
Psalm writer. Sheep herder. Harp player. These aren't the typical qualities found in a hero, let alone one to build an ambitious new television series around. But when that hero is a young man named David (played by Michael Iskander), who would live a life with defining moments like defeating a giant named Goliath (Martyn Ford) and becoming the king of Israel, 'House of David' coming to life is something of a no-brainer. What wasn't as much of a given was that this inspirational story predominantly from the Bible would wind up finding a home at Amazon's Prime Video. 'We were thinking about doing it independently at the time,' admits executive producer Jon Erwin ('Jesus Revolution'), who said meeting with the streaming giant changed everything. 'It was a huge surprise and a miracle that Amazon would really see our audience with this kind of legitimacy and give us these kinds of resources and yet allow us to be in control of the material.' Like another successful scripted drama, 'The Chosen,' which follows Jesus Christ (Jonathan Roumie), its creator recently announced that the upcoming fifth season would premiere exclusively on Prime Video in June (after a theatrical run in March), the audience watching isn't necessarily hunting for faith-based programming, just good television, which lines up with the original 'House of David' vision. 'We weren't looking to make a religious show,' says executive producer Jon Gunn. 'We're looking to make a compelling show that we would want to watch and so, if it works, it's not at all about religion. It's about these humans in this moment living this story.' The story told in 'House of David's' eight-episode first season begins on the outskirts of Bethlehem in 1000 B.C. with David growing from a harp-playing, psalm-singing teenage boy watching over the king's sheep to the courageous young man unexpectedly anointed as the future king who also uses a single rock to bring down a giant. Besides David's journey to power, the series also delves into the opposing House of Saul and House of Samuel. 'This is a war of houses,' teases Erwin. The show's stories 'come primarily from three chapters of the Bible in the book of first Samuel,' says Erwin, adding the Psalms of David (more than 70 are credited to him), were paramount in revealing a complex person with relatable humanity. 'There are only a few psalms where he's like, 'Thank God, my life is good.' Most of them are like, 'I'm depressed. I've failed myself and my family.' It really is the spectrum of human emotions in this incredibly honest, authentic way.' However, to be able to tell these great stories, the right actor who could play the future king needed to be found and he would need to fulfill everything on an extensive checklist. 'We were determined to find a David who was a teenager, not yet a man, somebody who had the potential to become a leader and a warrior but had the spirit of a kid who was frustrated with his father being stuck at home and wanting to live a life,' Gunn says. That actor should also be of Middle Eastern descent and have the depth to seamlessly convey a person wrestling with both external and internal conflict. And he needed to be able to sing. 'This was months and months of failing and not finding our person to the extent that you start to wonder, can we even make 'House of David?'' Gunn says. But the arrival of a self-tape audition from Egypt-born Iskander, who had zero television experience and one Broadway show ('Kimberly Akimbo') to his credit, saved the day. Iskander says he knew the story of David well from Sunday school, but it was while watching 'The Chosen' that he spoke aloud a destiny to manifest. 'I was like, 'I'd love to be on something like that one day.' I told my family, and they're like, 'Who would you even play?' I said, 'maybe King David.' Fast-forward three years later and I got an email that said, 'audition for the character David.'' Initially told he didn't book the role, he put the idea of playing David behind him for a few weeks until another request for him to audition arrived again. 'Immediately I call my mom and she says, 'You better start praying and fasting right now, buddy,'' Iskander says. He listened to his mother, praying and fasting while also working with a coach to submit the best audition possible, which made it to Gunn and Erwin. 'Everything stopped,' Gunn recalls. 'I watched probably 10 seconds and I lit up and then said, 'but wait a minute, can he sing?'' The answer was yes (Iskander had also submitted a rendition of Billy Joel's song 'Vienna') and the actor was quickly set to meet with Erwin in New York City. 'If this is a really good meeting, it will probably last about an hour. If it's just OK, maybe like 20 or 30 minutes,' the actor recalls. The meeting went on for three hours with Erwin telling Iskander in the end, ''I believe that you are built for this part. I believe there's a destiny to this.'' Another factor that worked in the actor's favor was his athleticism. 'Not only did he look and feel right and have the spirit and the voice, but he had exactly the physical training to do the authentic sling in the way we wanted,' Gunn says. To prep for filming, Iskander worked with an ancient weaponry expert but, he explains, 'in high school I did shot put and discus and it was the same exact thing. It took me three days and I was pretty solid with the sling as well as with combos.' Athletic prowess would come in handy for Iskander while shooting the iconic David and Goliath battle, which is teased in the premiere episode and then comes later in the season, but he also leaned into a less obvious emotional component in David's heart. 'I thought of the level of courage it takes to face a giant as a shepherd but also the amount of love that it takes,' Iskander says. 'He was able to face the giant not because he hated him, but because David loved the people behind him and loved his God more than this giant. That's one of the things that surprised me is his amount of love and the amount of weight that he was carrying.' That battle needed to be believable, but, by choice, it would be done without extensive special effects. Instead, Erwin and Gunn cited films like the original 'Gladiator' and 'Braveheart,' which didn't rely on technology for their larger-than-life stories. 'It really is kind of a love letter to an older way of making things that was much more grounded in reality and practical effects and forced perspective,' Erwin says. Adds Gunn, 'we have built small cameras, small-form factors that allow us to go into the land here in Greece so our approach, it doesn't feel like we're a massive production to us.' Filming predominantly south of Athens in Greece helped maintain a natural grandness for the project. 'I wanted to film at a place where the locations were as big as the emotions,' Erwin says. 'We wanted to inconvenience ourselves to go to some of these extraordinary places on Earth where the epic-ness of the landscape itself was doing the work.' Adds Gunn, 'the locations that we're putting on film include these mountains that have structures built on them that are thousands of years old.' Although David's name looms large in the show's title, Goliath is revealed to be more than merely his size. 'He's got a family, he's got a mother (Orpah, played by Sian Webber) and there's some history that we learn about the legends of the Nephilim,' says Gunn about humanizing the character. 'When that confrontation comes, you're invested and understand what emotionally is driving both David on one side and Goliath the other.' And although there's a largeness to 'House of David,' its biggest strength is peeling away the stuff of legends. 'Then it all becomes stories of relationships and families and parent-child struggles,' Gunn says. 'This is just an epic backdrop for a very human story.'
Fox News
23-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Fox News
New Amazon series 'House of David' will bring 'unlikely' biblical hero's story to life
A new biblical epic launching on Amazon's streaming service this week will bring the story of David and Goliath to life for audiences worldwide. "'House of David' tells the story of the ascent of the biblical figure, David, who eventually becomes the most renowned and celebrated king of Israel," Amazon says. "The series follows the once-mighty King Saul as he falls victim to his own pride. At the direction of God, the prophet Samuel anoints an unlikely, outcast teenager as the new king." "As Saul loses his power over his kingdom, David finds himself on a journey to discover and fulfill his destiny, navigating love, loss, and violence in the court of the very man he's destined to replace. As one leader falls, another must rise." The Prime video series launches on February 27 with three episodes and one episode weekly thereafter. For creator Jon Erwin, the project is the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. In an interview with Fox News Digital, the showrunner behind several faith-based hits revealed he's wanted to tell David's story for decades. He started writing the script for "House of David" as a teenager after visiting King David's tomb in Jerusalem. "It just felt like this huge story to take on and to try to do justice," Erwin said. "You underestimate when you're young the long seasons of preparation that are necessary to do something this big. And so every film that I've made, it's been trying to develop the skills necessary to take on the life of David. As a filmmaker, this is like a dream come true and something that I've been working towards my whole career." Erwin believes David's story still resonates with people because he represents the original "underdog" who overcame the odds. "This is the original 'hero's journey,'" Erwin said about David's humble beginnings as a shepherd boy to being anointed king of Israel. Despite living an amazing life, David was a relatable and "flawed" hero, Erwin said. "I love what the Bible says about him, that he's a man after God's own heart, despite being an incredibly flawed character who made some pretty epic mistakes along with his epic accomplishments. He's a very human character," Erwin said. Erwin's production studio, The Wonder Project, partnered with MGM Studios and Amazon to develop the epic series, which was shot on location in Greece. After the surprise success of his 2023 film, "Jesus Revolution," Erwin believes that mainstream Hollywood studios are finally taking notice of audiences who want more faith-based and uplifting entertainment. "To have creative control of a Prime Video global release at this level of scope and scale is a miracle. But it's a miracle that I attribute to the audience and just how loud the audience has been saying we want more content, we want bigger and better things that we can watch with the whole family," Erwin said. "The world's a tough place right now and I think people really want to be inspired. They want stories that uplift and remind us of what we can be and should be," he continued. "So I think there's a growing appetite for films that matter and restore hope in things worth believing in."
