Jesus (1979) - 12/3/13 (Walmart Exclusive)

[The Mad Kiwi]

Walmart Pre-Order up

No word, yet, on any extras. I believe the DVD has a commentary track and featurette, but I don't actually own it myself to verify. Hopefully those get ported over.

I find this film's history more interesting than the film itself. It originally started off as part of the Genesis Project's New Media Bible, the precursor to the Visual Bible series. Like that series, the New Media Bible's goal was to film the entire Bible word-for-word. They got as far as the first 22 chapters of Genesis and the first 4 chapters of Luke before they ran into financial problems, so they partnered with Campus Crusade for Christ to finish filming Luke as a feature-length evangelical tool. During this, all of Luke was shot, and Genesis was completed. Genesis Project hoped the theatrical release would bring revenue and publicity in that could help fuel their series further, but the Jesus film lost money in its release, and the New Media Bible wasn't continued.

The entire book of Luke was filmed with a 4-hour running time and pared down to two for the Jesus film. That means half of that book would've had to have been re-shot as the Genesis Project version actually had the actors speak in Hebrew and Aramaic while an English narrator read directly from the Scriptures, whereas the Jesus film has the actors speaking in English with occasional narration (though all of the actors save for Brian Deacon as Jesus were redubbed). The 4-four New Media Bible version has been released to VHS but never to DVD.

In a bizarre move, the raising of Lazarus (which is from John's gospel, not Luke's) was filmed but doesn't show up in either version. It pops up in a Reader's Digest documentary, though (this clip is from a Portuguese version of that documentary):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyYr3...utu.be&t=5m46s

Makes me wonder if they filmed any other scenes from other gospels to safeguard future New Media Bible installments. Either way, I'd love for the New Media version and any extra scenes to make their way to a release someday. That version is far superior to the theatrical Jesus film, and all of the actors involved have expressed disappointment in the 2-hour version. I'll settle for the theatrical version in the meantime since I'm curious to see how it looks in HD.

[HDTV1080P]

Does anyone own this Walmart Jesus Blu-ray that was scheduled to be released on 12-3-2013? According to the Walmart website it is not available at this time, which suggests that if the Blu-ray was really released on 12-3-2013, that it most likely was limited to only 3,000 copies stamped at the factory. I am not interested in this Blu-ray from Arc Entertainment since it is only the 117 minute version of the Jesus Film. On April 1st 2014 the 128 minute version of the Jesus Film was released on Blu-ray.

The Jesus Film Blu-ray (35th Anniversary Edition) April 1st 2014