Whoa! "The King of Kings" Delivers a Massive Debut in Theaters

The performance of this is animated feature about the life of Christ tops nearly all opening weekends by faith-based films in recent years.

A screenshot of the Jesus character in a scene from "The King of Kings." Image: Angel Studios/from YouTube.

With a whopping $19.3 million in North American ticket sales from Friday through Sunday, The King of Kings, from distributor Angel Studios, claimed second place overall at the box office, according to The Numbers website. More important still, that revenue figure is the highest we can recall from all but one movie in the faith-based genre since we launched Christian Film Blog back in 2018.

A social media graphic of the CinemaScore A+ audience rating earned by "The King of Kings." Image: CinemaScore/from Instagram.

It is more than the first weekend of hits like The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, Jesus Revolution, and I Can Only Imagine - which, respectively, opened with revenue of $10.7 million, $15.8 million, and $17.1 million - and are among the most popular Christian pictures of the last seven years. The one exception is the 2023 blockbuster Sound of Freedom, also from Angel Studios, which delivered $19.6 million in its opening weekend and went on to bring in a colossal $184 million in total domestic revenue, making it the second highest grossing faith-based film ever, behind only The Passion of the Christ.

Hard to see The King of Kings reaching those dizzying heights, but somewhere north of $50 million seems well within reach, especially since opening-night audiences surveyed by market research company CinemaScore gave it a rare A+ rating, the highest mark on the A+ to F scale. Were it to pull that off, the picture could catch Jesus Revolution, which delivered total North American revenue of $52.1 during its theatrical release back in 2023.