Director Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ has returned to the big screen in an official Lionsgate studios re-release from September 10th to the 17th, further enshrining the blockbuster Biblical epic in cinematic history along the likes of Ben-Hur, The 10 Commandments, and Jesus of Nazareth.
Released on February 25, 2004, Gibson’s brutal, unflinching chronicle of Christ’s crucifixion defied all expectations, breaking records to become the highest-grossing R-rated film at the time with a final box office haul of $612 million worldwide. Renowned film critics, the world over, saw Gibson’s vision and gave Passion high praise.
“I prefer to evaluate a film on the basis of what it intends to do, not on what I think it should have done. It is clear that Mel Gibson wanted to make graphic and inescapable the price that Jesus paid (as Christians believe) when he died for our sins,” wrote Roger Ebert in his four-star review in the Chicago Sun Times.
In the 22 years since its original release, Passion’s popularity has only increased, with repeated annual rewatches during Holy Week and an upcoming tw0-part sequel set for release in May 2027.
“I just wanted to make it as real as possible for people to enter into that journey, which is pretty grueling,” Gibson told EWTN’s Raymond Arroyo in a recent interview. “Previous depictions of it had been pretty much sanitized, and they made it look easy, and it wasn’t. So I wanted to emphasize that this was not easy. In fact, he [Jim Caviezel] didn’t want to do it.”
Reflecting on the film’s box office success, Gibson said people had a “hunger for it,” spurring them to “see it in droves.”
“And then I think others realized that there was a place where they could share their visions. And then there was zeal amongst faith-based people and filmmakers to explore it further,” he added.
On the upcoming sequel, Gibson told the Christian Post that the film will remain faithful to the life of Christ while coloring some of the missing gaps not written in the Gospels. Director Franco Zeffirelli employed a similar strategy with his 1977 masterpiece Jesus of Nazareth.
“If you look at the synoptic Gospels — and they are synoptic, which means they don’t tell you everything,” Gibson said. “And even John says, ‘Y’know, hey, there were many other things [Jesus] said and did which, if they were to be written down, couldn’t fill all the libraries of all the world,’ right? So there’s a lot of stuff that wasn’t written and the Gospels are synoptic.”
“One can look at these things and go, ‘I wonder what was around that?’ and try and analyze those things and make suppositions about what might have been,” he continued. “Not to go against anything in orthodox teaching but to enhance, I think, what’s there for everyone to see and hopefully they’ll be surprised by some of those revelations.”
The film’s re-release will run from September 10-17, with screenings to include exclusive, behind-the-scenes peek at The Resurrection of the Christ.