What Happened to Martin Scorsese’s Jesus Film? Status, Faith & Why It Still Matters

Fast answer: is Scorsese’s Jesus film still happening?

There is still a real project behind the headlines. Scorsese announced his intention to make another film centered on Jesus after meeting Pope Francis in 2023. Reporting later identified Shūsaku Endō’s A Life of Jesus as the source material and Scorsese and Kent Jones as the screenwriters. But planned production did not move forward on the original schedule.

In September 2024, Variety reported that the project had been postponed while remaining in development. In 2025, PBS described the film as not yet having entered production. I have not found a later reliable announcement confirming a production start or release date.

Why the original 2024 framing needed to change

When I first wrote about this project in January 2024, I treated it as an approaching film and speculated about how it might intersect with Christian nationalism, political polarization and global conflict. That was too confident. A film still in development should not be described as though its final message, tone or political meaning is already known.

The better question is not, “What political argument will Scorsese make?” It is, “What does Scorsese keep returning to when he wrestles with Jesus?” That question has much more evidence behind it.

Scorsese keeps returning to Jesus as a mystery, not a slogan

That pattern runs through The Last Temptation of Christ, Silence, his public reflections on Catholicism, and now this planned project. In June 2026, reflecting again on The Last Temptation of Christ, Scorsese described depicting Jesus as entering “mystery territory” and emphasized the enduring Christian tension of Jesus as fully human and fully divine. Vatican News published his remarks.

That is a more useful lens for this project than trying to assign it a culture-war position before anyone has seen the film. Scorsese’s religious cinema is usually strongest when certainty becomes uncomfortable: belief collides with weakness, doctrine collides with suffering, and people discover that faith is harder to live than it is to declare.

Why Shūsaku Endō matters

Endō is not new territory for Scorsese. He previously adapted Endō’s Silence, a story obsessed with faith under pressure, cultural distance, apostasy and the possibility of grace where believers least expect it. A film shaped by A Life of Jesus therefore makes sense as a continuation of questions Scorsese has been asking for decades rather than a sudden attempt to make a conventional biblical epic.

That distinction matters. A familiar Gospel story can still become artistically challenging when the creator asks how Jesus is understood by people who are wounded, doubtful, politically divided or culturally distant from the world in which Christianity first spread.

Five questions worth carrying into the film

1. How will the film balance Jesus’ humanity and divinity? Scorsese continues to identify that tension as central to his interest.
2. How much of Endō’s perspective will survive into the screenplay? Adaptation can preserve a book’s spiritual questions without reproducing its structure literally.
3. Will the film invite faith, interrogation, or both? Scorsese’s strongest religious work rarely treats those as opposites.
4. How will modern audiences respond before seeing it? The Last Temptation of Christ remains a reminder that religious films can become political symbols before viewers engage with the work itself.
5. Can a Jesus film create serious dialogue instead of simply confirming existing camps? That may be the most interesting test of all.

What I will not assume this time

I will not assume the film has a release date until one is formally announced. I will not treat rumored casting as confirmed casting. I will not assign Scorsese a political thesis based on a film that has not been released. And I will not confuse a director’s personal Catholic faith with a guarantee that every Christian audience will agree with his interpretation.

What we can say is more interesting anyway: Scorsese is still thinking publicly about Jesus, faith and cinema more than three decades after one of the most controversial religious films in modern American culture. If A Life of Jesus eventually reaches the screen, that history will follow it into every conversation.