I don’t know everyone in the FilmDrunk community personally, but I’m confident that 0% of our readers have been eagerly anticipating the Heaven is for Real sequel. Congratulations, everyone, your non-prayers have been answered! According to The Hollywood Reporter, the team behind Heaven is for Real has reunited to produce Miracles From Heaven, a story that promises to be even more horrifying than its predecessor. [And not to be confused with Same Kind of Different As Me, a film adaptation of another book by Heaven is for Real co-author Lynn Vincent being produced at a different studio].
More hateful? More nightmarish? That may seem like an exaggeration, but it’s not. While Heaven is for Real stoked the old culture war fires, Miracles From Heaven features a small child wandering around with a colostomy bag in search of a miracle. The film will be based on the book Three Miracles from Heaven which somehow – also miraculously – is based on a true story. Three Miracles tells the story of a woman named Christy Beam and her daughter, who suffers from a rare digestive disorder. She’s forced to use a colostomy bag and eat through a straw, because her condition is serious and doctors can’t find a cure. Then one day, Beam’s daughter falls down three flights of stairs and is sent to heaven, where’s she’s cured, before returning to Earth.
The project is an adaptation of Three Miracles From Heaven: A Sick Little Girl, Her Journey to Heaven, and the Lives Forever Changed, an upcoming book by Christy Beam; Randy Brown, who wrote Clint Eastwood’s Trouble With the Curve, is on board to write the script. There was a major interest for the book rights, with the story selling preemptively to Hachette. Due to the strong enthusiasm for this project, Hachette will release the book next spring.
To be honest, I’m not sure how you can really be “cured” if you’re “already dead” but I guess that’s not the point. What the actual point is I don’t know, but I imagine it has something to do with Obamacare and dead children. Does Mary take her off the colostomy bag and then place her on an intravenous juice cleanse? Does Gabriel feed her gluten-free saltines until her pancreas resurrects? I don’t know, but maybe I should read the book. After all, this story is based on a real-life story about a child using Jesus as a gastroenterologist.
Heaven is for Real grossed $91 million domestically with a budget just $12 million, so Sony is similarly optimistic about Miracles from The Operating Table. Megachurch pastor T. D. Jakes and Joe Roth (a son of actual Communists who once helped get organized prayer outlawed in public schools) are set to produce. No word yet on who will resurrect this sick, dying concept.