‘The Chosen’ Producer Reveals ‘Red Sea Moment’ That Prompted Them to Stream Show for Free By Tré Goins-Phillips for Faith Wire
With some of the most popular shows on streaming platforms costing upwards of $10 million per episode, it’s a real come-from-behind success story to see the faith-based drama “The Chosen” earning north of 400 million streams on a budget of around $22 million total.
It’s even more impressive when you consider the show, which just ended its second season, is available for free to anyone who wants to watch it.
Derral Eves, executive producer of “The Chosen,” recently told Faithwire the decision to air the wildly popular series free of charge was prompted by what he called a “Red Sea moment.”
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“Every time along the project, we hit a wall,” he said. “It’s what we call a ‘Red Sea moment.’ It’s the moment we get to the Red Sea, we look behind us, you know, here’s Egypt’s army coming to attack us, and we just can’t go anywhere.”
“So we have to rely upon God to part the Red Sea so we can go forward,” he continued, referring to Exodus 14, which chronicles Moses’ journey leading the Israelites out of Egypt. “We just kind of had a ‘Red Sea moment.’ We’ve become very sensitive, where we can’t go any further, and we’re very prayerful and looking for all the options.”
Earlier on in the interview, Eves said he, show creator Dallas Jenkins, and the rest of the team at “The Chosen” realized that, “if it’s a story about Jesus, it needs to go out to the world.”
The producer said choosing to stream the show for free was “a very disruptive idea” and “the right idea to get it out to a billion people in every country, because that’s the only way you could do that.”
