The King of Kings

[Frank Cox]

This is the whole Jesus story told in the form of a cartoon. It's pretty good and entertaining, other than that a few of their voice actors mumble so it's difficult to figure out what they're saying.

But there's one thing here that I'm really not impressed with.

As soon as the credits start a chryon shows up at the bottom left of the screen: "Special message starts in 3:00", and then counts down the seconds to zero.

Okey dokey, special message. Fine and dandy.

But their special message is a money grab. It's an on-screen qr code that takes you to angel.com/shareking where you can give them $75.

"Upon submitting my Pay it Forward payment, I acknowledge and agree that Angel Studios becomes the owner of all funds upon receipt. Your Pay it Forward purchase, like other entertainment purchases, is meant to increase the audience and reach of the film The King of Kings; it is not a donation."

I guess they can ask the viewers to send them money if they want to but I suspect people here could be misled into thinking that their payment to Angel Studios will somehow pay for movie tickets for people to come and see the movie here. Which is not, of course, the case.

On the other hand the special message does have a bunch of kids saying Happy Easter, so there is that.

[Mike Blakesley]

I think all, or most, Angel Studios movies have something like that on them. When we played Sound of Freedom it had the same kind of thing, but it said the money would specifically go to buy tickets for those who can't afford them, or something similar. I don't really like it.

[Mike Blakesley]

We are playing this over the Easter weekend. I did a test of it last night. The opening of the movie is beyond annoying. (For those who don't know, the movie is framed in a story of Charles Dickens telling the story of Jesus to his son.)

That little kid character (Charles's son) has to be the most irritating little kid character in the history of movies. I was hoping to be enthralled and hate to turn it off, but after about 10 minutes I had enough. It's one of those situations where the dad is trying to do something (in this case, perform in a theater) and the kid keeps misbehaving. I have no kids, but I hate it when kids misbehave and the parents keep telling them to cut it out, but the kids just keep doing what they want anyway and never see any consequences for misbehaving. That's exactly what happens in the first few minutes of this movie, so it kinda made my blood boil. I'm already looking forward to this one being gone. (I've never been much for animated Bible stories anyway.)