Every screen Passion ends on the same hill, and audiences have always taken their seats knowing it. The Chosen, the crowdfunded historical drama that follows Jesus of Nazareth through the eyes of fishermen, a tax collector and a woman from Magdala, reaches that hill in its sixth season on Prime Video. The episodes will stream. The crucifixion itself is being held back for cinemas.

The season covers a single day, and the studio’s synopsis does not soften it: “The hour has come. Before the sun sets, Jesus of Nazareth will be dead.” Jonathan Roumie returns as Jesus, with Shahar Isaac as Peter, Elizabeth Tabish as Mary Magdalene, Paras Patel as Matthew and Vanessa Benavente as his mother. The other side of the story belongs to Richard Fancy’s Caiaphas, Paul Ben-Victor’s Herod and Andrew James Allen’s Pontius Pilate, with Luke Dimyan as Judas. The synopsis gives the three readings of the same execution in one line: “Pharisees call it justice. Romans call it peace. Followers call it murder.”

Dallas Jenkins, who created the series and writes and directs it, put the challenge plainly when the season was announced. “Everyone knows the basics of this part of the story, but not everyone knows the ‘why’ of the crucifixion and the extraordinary events of these 24 hours,” he said. His answer was a matter of format as much as script: “We realized this not only deserved a season of television but a standalone full-length theatrical event as well. We wrote and filmed all of it with this in mind.”

Read against a century of Jesus films, that last sentence is the news. Hollywood’s big versions, Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings and George Stevens’s The Greatest Story Ever Told, folded the whole ministry into a single sitting and left the Passion as the third act. Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth showed in 1977 that television could afford the long road, spreading the story across a miniseries. Mel Gibson went the other way with The Passion of the Christ, cutting everything down to the final hours. The Chosen has now done both, one after the other: some forty episodes spent with the disciples, then a season given entirely to the last day. And then it hands the most painted scene in Western art to the cinema.

The location tightens the lineage. The crucifixion scenes were shot over three weeks in Matera, the southern Italian “City of Stones”, where the production traded its Texas studio for a real horizon. Pier Paolo Pasolini filmed The Gospel According to St. Matthew in the same city in 1964, and Gibson used it for The Passion of the Christ; the Associated Press, visiting the set, noted it has also hosted Mary Magdalene and No Time to Die. On the show’s usual sets in Texas and Utah, George H. Xanthis, who plays John, told the agency, “you do step from civilization into the ancient world, whereas here you are just always in the ancient world.”

Pasolini’s Gospel, with its non-professional cast, and Gibson’s Passion, remembered above all for its violence, are the two benchmarks any new crucifixion filmed on that ground will be held to. The Chosen brings something neither film had: an audience that has lived with its cast for years. Speaking to the Associated Press during the Matera shoot, Jenkins said he has seen people cry when they meet Roumie: “Seeing Jonathan reminds them of the experience they have with Jesus. So, there is a lot of tears. But they know the difference.” Vanessa Benavente, who plays Mother Mary, told the AP that people who recognize her say: “I know you are not her but it’s like the closest thing.”

That relationship is what the business was built on. Jenkins financed the pilot through crowdfunding, and the series is still supported by donations to the nonprofit Come and See Foundation; the studio now puts its audience at more than 300 million viewers. In 2025 Amazon MGM Studios signed a first-look deal with 5&2 Studios that brought the first five seasons to Prime Video and secured theatrical and streaming rights to the final two, which follow the crucifixion and the resurrection. The previous season had already tested the big screen: The Chosen: Last Supper played theaters in three parts before it reached Prime Video.

This season reverses that order. The streaming episodes come first, and the crucifixion story follows as a global theatrical film, which turns the scene every viewer already knows into the one they are asked to watch in a room full of strangers. It is the old logic of the Passion play, a story staged for a crowd that knows every line, applied to release windows. The calendar it walks into is not empty either: Lionsgate currently dates the first part of Gibson’s own sequel, The Resurrection of the Christ, for May 2027. And the split asks something new of an audience that built the show by watching for free. The first five seasons remain free on The Chosen’s own app; no free date has been announced for this one.

Jenkins is betting that the “why” is still untold. The harder question is the one every screen Passion has faced and none has settled: what can a story add when the audience already knows the last page, and when the series itself calls this moment eight years in the making?

How many episodes are there? Six on Prime Video. The season finale is a separate feature film for cinemas.

When do new episodes arrive? Three episodes premiere on November 15, 2026, followed by one each Sunday: November 22, November 29 and December 6.

Where can I watch it? Prime Video has confirmed the season in the U.S., Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. Seasons one to five are also streaming on Prime Video.

When is the theatrical finale? The crucifixion film opens in theaters in spring 2027 through Amazon MGM Studios, currently dated March 12, 2027. Its streaming date has not been announced.

Is this the last season? No. A seventh and final season will follow the resurrection.