Hot off the critical praise of his new rampage thriller Blood Father and on the promotional trail for his upcoming WWII film Hacksaw Ridge, Mel Gibson took a seat on the big stage at the SoCal Harvest Fest this past weekend to speak with the Rev. Greg Laurie about his real Passion project. Released in 2004, The Passion of the Christ was certainly controversial, but it was also a massive box office success, earning more than $611 million and the distinctions of being both the highest-grossing R-rated movie in the U.S. and the highest-grossing religious film of all time. Evangelicals in particular loved the film, and so Gibson made sure to thank them again, in person, while speaking with Laurie.
The crowd must have especially loved Gibson’s big news that his proposed sequel for The Passion is still moving ahead. While the cynics and sinners of Twitter mocked Gibson for his faith in the public’s demand to see more of his take on the life and death of Jesus, he now assures Laurie that the sequel will not simply be The Passion 2.
… that’s a huge undertaking. It’s not The Passion 2, I mean, it’s called The Resurrection. Of course, that’s a very big subject and it needs to be looked at, because we don’t wanna just do a simple rendering of it. I mean, we can all read what happened, but in order to really experience and explore probably deeper meanings of what it’s about is gonna take some doing. Randall Wallace is up to the task. As well as a brilliant writer, he’s a great director. He directed We Were Soldiers and Heaven is for Real…
Gibson also explained why he has been so devoted to faith-based movies like The Passion and Hacksaw Ridge, calling The Passion the “ultimate superhero movie” and adding, “Real superheroes don’t wear spandex, and they don’t have 3-D special effects, but they do operate on a higher level, on a supernatural level. They actually look and appeal to something greater than themselves, and then they do something superhuman.”
Perhaps that’s his way of saying he won’t be in a Marvel movie after all.
