{"id":581,"date":"2004-03-07T19:59:52","date_gmt":"2004-03-07T23:59:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/2004\/03\/07\/passion-pure\/"},"modified":"2004-03-07T19:59:52","modified_gmt":"2004-03-07T23:59:52","slug":"passion-pure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/2004\/03\/07\/passion-pure\/","title":{"rendered":"Passion Pure"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I love the way people keep underestimating<\/STRONG> Gibson<\/STRONG>‘s The Passion<\/EM>.<\/P>
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It wouldn’t take much to note that we haven’t had a major worldwide passion play<\/STRONG> for a long time, that such plays have always been a source of public reflection, entertainment, and discussion, and that this taps into wellsprings which somehow people have skirted in modern media.  [considering how many little passion plays are put on with great regularity<\/STRONG> across Europe, you’d think there would at least be more mainstream novellas and cartoons and indy theatre performances of variations on this theme across this country and the Christian world.]<\/P>
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Now that it’s clear this will be Gibson’s most famous<\/STRONG> and successful endeavour, and that it is already a massive success, people could <\/EM>acknowledge that it will become an instant classic, and be similarly successful on a 6-month timescale and after it goes to video.  so I would think.   But the current projections (it’s already passed $200M<\/A> in gross in 2 weekends) are merely that it will “eventually gross over $300M”.  Excuse me?  Say what?  Eventually as in “by April”, right?  I have no doubt that this will eventually top $1B in worldwide sales.  Not only has there been nothing like it for decades, there is nothing <\/STRONG>like it in the works — even if other filmmakers change their tune and start trying to follow in its footsteps, it will take many years for that to happen.<\/P>
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My prediction, based on how funding for this movie worked out:  Gibson ends up on the Forbes “billionnaires of the world”<\/EM> list within 5 years.  Let’s hear it for putting your money where your dreams are.<\/P>
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And, for the record, I haven’t seen it yet and have no idea whether it could reasonably be considered “anti-Semitic”, but I doubt it was conceived or will be remembered that way.<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I love the way people keep underestimating Gibson‘s The Passion. It wouldn’t take much to note that we haven’t had a major worldwide passion play for a long time, that such plays have always been a source of public reflection, entertainment, and discussion, and that this taps into wellsprings which somehow people have skirted in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[209],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-popular-demand"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}