California megachurch pastor Greg Laurie announced that the box-office hit film Jesus Revolution will release on Netflix later this month.
“BIG NEWS!” Laurie tweeted on Monday. “@JesusRevMovie coming to @netflix July 31st, 2023! A whole new audience is going to see this film now. Let’s all be praying that God uses it to touch lives.”
BIG NEWS!@JesusRevMovie coming to @netflix July 31st, 2023!
A whole new audience is going to see this film now. Let’s all be praying that God uses it to touch lives. pic.twitter.com/iz05n8CuN8— Greg Laurie (@greglaurie) July 4, 2023
Jesus Revolution, a film centered around the Jesus Movement in the 1970s, was released in theaters on February 24. On its opening weekend, the movie received an A+ from CinemaScore and earned more than $15.8 million. The film also grossed over $52 million domestically and received an additional $312,000 internationally, ChurchLeaders.com reports.
In addition to its box-office success, “Jesus Revolution” landed on No. 1 spot on Amazon’s Movies & TV chart following its release on Blu-ray and DVD on April 25, surpassing “John Wick: Chapter 4,” “Top Gun: Maverick,” and “Super Mario Bros.”
Although the film was nominated for a 2023 K-Love Fan Award, it lost to the popular Christian series The Chosen.
Kasey Moore, who tracks what is streaming on Netflix, noted that this is the first that the film’s premiere will be a first for the streaming platform.
“In the 1970s, young Greg Laurie is searching for all the right things in all the wrong places: until he meets Lonnie Frisbee, a charismatic hippie-street-preacher. Together with Pastor Chuck Smith, they open the doors of Smith’s languishing church to an unexpected revival of radical and newfound love, leading to what TIME Magazine dubbed a JESUS REVOLUTION,” the film’s synopsis reads.
During an interview on the “The Stetzer ChurchLeaders Podcast,” Laurie explained that the film was used as a tool for evangelism during its theatrical run.
“We had people accepting Christ in the theaters,” he indicated. “I had one person say, ‘I heard people around me praying out loud asking Jesus to come into their life.’ We had pastors on hand. We had Bibles on hand…I’ve never heard of anything quite like this, doing evangelism in movie theaters on this scale.”
Photo courtesy: ©Lionsgate, used with permission.
Milton Quintanilla is a freelance writer and content creator. He is a contributing writer for Christian Headlines and the host of the For Your Soul Podcast, a podcast devoted to sound doctrine and biblical truth. He holds a Masters of Divinity from Alliance Theological Seminary.