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--:-- Georgia Howe: Welcome to Morning Wire, I'm Georgia Howe.
--:-- John Bickley: And I'm John Bickley, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief.
--:-- Georgia Howe: It's Thursday, November 24th, and this is your Thanksgiving edition of Morning Wire.
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--:-- Georgia Howe: For this special Thanksgiving episode, I sit down with the director and creator of Chosen, Dallas Jenkins, to discuss how his team managed to create the hit series, its unique funding structure with Angel Studios, and why it's become such a massive success on various streaming platforms.
--:-- Dallas Jenkins: Well, thanks for coming on and congratulations on the success of The Chosen, including now in theaters.
--:-- Georgia Howe: First, tell us about what you guys are doing that's different than everyone else in the entertainment sphere, particularly in terms of how you produce the series.
--:-- Dallas Jenkins: I don't know how, I mean, what you guys are doing is pretty different too. And it's this concept of not relying on the traditional system, which I don't hate. And I mean, I love movies. I love TV shows. I love a lot of the streaming platforms. But the traditional platforms and the traditional system doesn't work for everybody and it oftentimes doesn't help you on the front end. Sometimes you're knocking on the door and the door is locked.
--:-- John Bickley: In your case, the door was locked because your movie had failed. You had a movie come out in theaters in 2017 and it was a bomb at the box office. And then you had a story idea, an idea for a show about the life of Christ. And most of the rooms in which you would knock on the door are not really interested in doing a Jesus show.
--:-- Dallas Jenkins: So between a failure that I was coming off of and the subject matter that I wanted to talk about and a show I wanted to make, there weren't people lining around the block for me. So what we did was we launched The Chosen as a crowdfunded opportunity, meaning my short film, I made this short film about the birth of Christ from the perspective of the shepherds for my church's Christmas Eve service. That's all it was intended for. But while I was making it, I had this idea. I mean, I shot this on my friend's farm 20 minutes from my house. We put that out on social media. And at the end of it, I said, look, if you want to invest, we had an opportunity for a public crowdfunding investment opportunity.
--:-- John Bickley: And so I didn't think it was going to work. It was an idea from a distribution partner that I thought was ridiculous. But the concept was people watch this short film, hear about my idea of the show, and then they can invest. Not just not a donation. This was actually an investment.
--:-- Dallas Jenkins: And I thought, well, the all-time crowdfunding record is over $5 million from projects that had big fan bases. We have no fan base. Well, very long story short, we ended up generating over $10 million from 19,000 people around the world investing in this thing. And that's what launched season one and since then because the show is free. So you don't have to sign up. You don't have to give an email address. You don't have to do anything. You have to pay anything to watch the show. We also made it in our own app. So you know you watch it on the Chosen app. It's totally free and easy. This is not we're not beholden to another platform. That has really given us the freedom to do what we want, which is something you guys understand of course.
--:-- John Bickley: People have the option to donate to it if they so choose. And that's been something that I think has really allowed this show to reach the mass appeal that it has. And now we've crossed 100 million viewers around the world. We're in every country now. That whole thing has just happened, I think, because of the fact that we've been doing things different.
--:-- Georgia Howe: You use the term invest rather than donate in the early stages. What do you mean by that?
--:-- Dallas Jenkins: Well, this was literally an investment. The 16,000 plus, the number I think is 16,000 actually, plus people who invested early on, they have an ownership in the show. So as the show is generating income and potentially profits over the course of several years, my co-founders and I, we own one part of the business. And the other half, I think it's somewhere around 45% of the business is owned by these 16,000 investors. So when the show succeeds, they succeed. And we were just able to actually announce recently that they got their money back plus 20%. So we actually delivered on that initial promise. And then from now until the end of time, they still have ownership in the show. So if there's ever distributions from profits of this show, they share with us in that. And so it's a really cool opportunity. And their investment, I mean, again, I have to be careful with what I say publicly, but their investment has already returned plus profit. And it's looking extremely good for the future.
--:-- John Bickley: So now, you provide access to The Chosen for free. So how do you monetize something like this? This is often where those kinds of projects fail. How do you monetize something like The Chosen?
--:-- Dallas Jenkins: Right. So people have the opportunity, if they want, to donate to the show. Now, we've partnered with this organization that was founded. It's called the Come and See Foundation. It was founded for the purpose of expanding the show around the world. An outside person came in and said, listen, we want this show to get everywhere. We want to translate it into hundreds of languages. We want it to reach places that you can't reach. We want to jumpstart these efforts. Your budgets are lower. We want to get them higher because we want this show to have every opportunity to succeed. So we give people the opportunity to donate to that foundation. And that money goes towards production funds, marketing funds, all of that. That's the nonprofit side. Now, the for-profit side has come from merchandise sales, which we were doing early on. That has been significant. And then also commercial licensing. So, for example, if there was another platform that after it's been in our app for a period of time, wants to license it. I mean, season one has been on Amazon, it's been on Netflix, it's been on multiple platforms. And that has generated some income as well. So that's where the for-profit side comes from. And the non-profit side comes from this. And we have people, I'm not saying anything that's not public, because you can see the progress in our app. But we have people donating in excess of millions of dollars. I mean, people can donate everything from 15 bucks to, I mean, they can donate whatever they want. And that opportunity that people have has been a supercharge to the show.
--:-- John Bickley: It strikes me that a lot of this is very counterintuitive, particularly for the Hollywood model. One of the criticisms leveled at Hollywood a lot is that there's so much waste and so much money thrown at projects really unnecessarily. How are you guys managing to be more efficient with your funds?
--:-- Dallas Jenkins: Well, what's so interesting about what you saying is it's a really good question because most platforms, network studios, or whatever when they launch a new show, well, the first couple of seasons, there's no way it's going to be profitable. It's very expensive to put on a new show. You don't know if it's going to find an audience yet. So you're putting money in that you don't know if it's going to pay off. And most shows, I don't know if I want to say most, but a lot of shows don't ever make money because they don't have enough seasons to get the big syndication dollars that can come. Or a lot of times movies just don't succeed. So all of that is very, very challenging. Well, what they have going for them is they can take those risks because they've got so much money elsewhere coming from all the other shows that they've made and movies that they've made. So they can pump all that money into it and spend tens of millions of dollars to launch it. Well, we don't have that opportunity or luxury. I mean, the only money that we have is money that comes in from the fans for this particular show. So that's made it difficult. But to your point about efficiency, I think it's also made us smarter. Every dollar we spend, we consider it to be sacred money. And we don't have the ability to, nor the desire to, just put money towards fluff. That said, the good news is, is that now that we have more money coming in, we are able to pay our cast and crew closer to what they deserve. Now, we'll never reach full Hollywood budgets, but the fact that we can pay people better than they were the first couple seasons when we were completely independent, that's been for sure a great advantage. But yeah, we have to. We have no choice. We have to be efficient. We have to be smart. We have to be wise. And we don't have money coming in from other projects that we can just toss at this to see how it works.
--:-- John Bickley: Well, it strikes me that soon Hollywood won't be able to pay Hollywood prices for some of these actors.
--:-- Dallas Jenkins: One thing you alluded to is that the success of this kind of project and this kind of business model really depends upon the confidence of the investors and the donors. How do you maintain that? Is it transparency?
--:-- Dallas Jenkins: Well, that's a really great question because trust goes in two different directions. One is there's artistic trust, and then there's also spiritual trust, meaning they need to trust that actually the show is going to honor and be faithful to the stories of Jesus and the Gospels. And that's a big deal. So what we have done is from the beginning, transparency, like you said, has been kind of the hallmark of it. I mean, not only are we a public company, we're a publicly reporting company, but on our social media pages, we just decided from the beginning, you're going to see this whole process. I'm going to take you behind the scenes of myself, my family, the struggle to make this show. We're going to take you onto the set. So on our YouTube pages or Instagram page, Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, all of that, you get to see in real time often the progress of this show. And what they see is a couple of things. One, they see that we're spending the money wisely and that we're actually a professional show that's doing this right. They also get to know us better, which makes them feel more connected. And so if you're going to support a show like this or if you're going to even watch a show like this, some people are afraid to watch a Jesus show if they don't feel like they can trust it. So they feel like they know us better. And then finally, though, what's very important is that they do believe that I have the character and intentions of Jesus and the Gospels in good hands, that I am actually being faithful to that. Now, with all the artistic imagination that we're adding to these stories from the Bible, that's especially important. People do not want to put money towards or even their time towards something that they feel is going to be typically contradictory to the message of Christ. And so that's been a big deal for us. And so I feel like from the beginning, we've said, look, if they can trust me, they're going to then be more willing to invest literally and figuratively into the show. And that's been the case.
--:-- John Bickley: What's next for The Chosen and for your other projects? What are we seeing on the horizon here?
--:-- Dallas Jenkins: Well right now I really focused on The Chosen. I mean other projects are in development but it's a big enough task for me especially as a creator of the show. I not only have to make the show I have to market the show I have to keep the audience engaged. I now what they call an influencer. You know, we used an influencer model for this project. So that's a full-time job. But, you know, season three out now, you know, the first couple episodes are out and available. The first two seasons are available on the Chosen app. And, you know, you just look it up. It's easy to find. But here's the point. Right now, I am editing the rest of season three. While writing season four because we're going to start filming in the spring. The train really never stops. And so other projects that now people want to make with me now that the show is more successful, those are certainly in development. But I really don't want to take my hand off the plow of this project either because if this doesn't work, then a lot of other things won't work. So we've got projects in development. But for now, right now, I just need to get season four going. And when we're done with the seven seasons of the Chosen, I'll nap for about a year and then we'll start working on other things.
--:-- John Bickley: Now, stepping back and looking at this big picture, the response to The Chosen, which has been overwhelming, what do you think the lesson is here in terms of audience demand? What are they starving for? What are they missing?
--:-- Dallas Jenkins: Well, there's a—and you know this as well as anybody. I mean, the fact is Hollywood is largely dominated by groups of people who don't necessarily have the same values or the same background or faith interest as certain parts of the country. That's not their fault. And they have every right to make the products and content that they understand, that they know that reflects their background, the stories that they want to tell. But what this shows is that there is a large part of the country and a large part of the world. In fact, Christians represent the biggest or if not one of the biggest people groups in the entire world, people who believe in Christ. They want this kind of content and they don't get it. And what's cool about this, though, The Chosen, is that this has also been appealing to people who don't fit into that category. So what I think it speaks to is, I think if you're a Christian, this is certainly something that says, hey, look, someone is making a show that reflects my values, my love of Christ, and it's done in a way that can compete artistically with everything else that's out there. I don't need to apologize for watching it. I don't need to plug my nose to enjoy it. I can actually enjoy this. And that's proving that this group of people around the world, that number in the billions, deserve good entertainment as well. The other thing it shows is that I think even just the message of Christ, even if you don't believe that he was the son of God, even if you don't believe that he was the Messiah, you can still appreciate the stories of first century Galilee and what happened there that certainly changed the world. And so just like I can watch a show like Game of Thrones or a movie like Star Wars and not believe in the force or not believe in dragons, I can still appreciate good storytelling. And I think that's what people are, at least I hope, are responding to with this show.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Well, Dallas, thank you so much for joining us.
--:-- Dallas Jenkins: Thanks for having me on.
--:-- Georgia Howe: That was Chosen creator Dallas Jenkins. And again, if you haven't seen the series yet, you can watch it on the Chosen app along with other streaming platforms like Prime Video. The limited run Chosen film is in theaters through November 30th.
--:-- John Bickley: That's all the time we've got this morning. As it's Thanksgiving, we will not be running an afternoon update today, but we will be back bright and early tomorrow so you can listen to the news you need to know while you're standing in those Black Friday lines. Thanks for waking up with us and happy Thanksgiving.
