The team that brought us "I Can Only Imagine" launches a movie studio and announces a raft of new Christian films.
With four feature films to their name, brothers Andrew Erwin and Jon Erwin are already major players in the Christian movie genre: they're about to get much bigger. Last night outside Los Angeles, in a multi-media extravaganza that included film clips, animation, live music, a fog machine, and heavyweight audience members like faith-based filmmakers Alex Kendrick, Stephen Kendrick and DeVon Franklin, they unveiled ambitious plans at the annual convention of the National Religious Broadcasters.
Ready for this? They are launching a new movie studio - Kingdom Studios - have concrete plans for more than four feature films, including a musical with a big-time Christian rock band and teased the audience with a promise of TV shows, too. Holy smokes! If they pull all that off, it'll be the biggest thing ever in Christian entertainment.
And they are not going it alone, either. The Erwins, together with producing partner Kevin Downes, have some serious Hollywood muscle behind their endeavor. They are teaming up with Lionsgate, the studio that distributed their last film - and huge hit - I Can Only Imagine.
Amid all the razzmatazz of the glitzy production that was this announcement event, however, Jon Erwin was careful to point out that this is no vanity project. He said they chose the name Kingdom Studios very carefully in order to reflect the focus of what they're all about: drawing people to the Gospel of Christ through entertainment.
"We want to do this for the Kingdom, which as a Christian means we want to set aside our own egos and do something bigger than all of us that we can all unite around."
The Erwin Brothers laid that out in great detail, going through the film projects one by one. First up, I Still Believe, a biopic about Christian Rocker Jeremy Camp, due out next year. They'll be aiming to recapture lighting in a bottle like they did with I Can Only Imagine, which told the story of Bart Millard, lead singer of the Christian band Mercy Me.
After that, with no release dates yet, will come The Jesus Revolution, a true story about Christian revival among young Americans in the early 1970s; Apostles, the first film of a trilogy about Jesus' closest disciples and the formation of the Church; The Little Drummer Boy, a Civil War-related musical with the Christian rock band For King & Country.
This event, which ran an hour and 40 minutes and was streamed live on Facebook, ended with a word of prayer from well-known pastor Greg Laurie of Harvest Christian Fellowship in California, again underlining the Lord's role in the whole venture.
It also featured a powerful testimony from young actress Madeline Carroll, who played a lead role in I Can Only Imagine and will be working with the Erwins on this new endeavor. We don't have the space to get into what she discussed, but we encourage you to watch it via this link. She hits at about the one-hour-14-minute mark and it is worth your time.