Cindy Bond Interview & Timetable for Epic Stories of the Bible

Peter Chattaway has interviewed Cindy Bond - president and chief operating officer of Promenade Pictures who brought us last year's version of The Ten Commandments. There's actually two different versions of the interview out there. The one up at Christianity Today has had additional material courtesy of Mark Moring, whereas FilmChat includes the parts of the interview that discussed the Epic Stories of the Bible series as a whole.

After the interview, Bond also emailed Peter the list of films that will be covered by the series, along with a schedule for release:

1. The Ten Commandments -- October 19, 2007
2. The Flood -- Easter 2009
3. David and Goliath -- Fall 2009
4. Daniel and the Lion's Den -- Easter 2010
5. The Story of Esther -- Easter 2011
6. Creation -- Easter 2012
7. Jonah and the Whale -- Easter 2013
8. Samson and Delilah -- Easter 2014
9. Joshua and the Battle of Jericho -- Easter 2015
10. The Story of Peter -- Easter 2016
11. The Story of Paul -- Easter 2017
12. Bethlehem - birth of Christ -- Easter 2018

There are a few points I'd like to make on all this. Firstly, it's interesting that they are making these films out of sequence. I can imagine that they might have started with Moses in order to test the water, but I can't work out why the rest of the series varies so. In particular, ending the Old Testament series on Joshua, and leaving the nativity story until the very end is somewhat unusual.

Secondly, I'm surprised that out of all of those stories there are none that appear to deal with the ministry or the death of Jesus. These may well be touched on via flashbacks in the stories about Peter and Paul, but that omission is a bit of a shame, and I'm curious to know why that is.

Finally, there are a few stories here that have generally not had a lot of screen time to date. In particular, the stories of Daniel, Joshua and Jonah have been covered only sparingly. So it'll great if they find their way to the cinemas screens at some point over the next decade or so.

The interview at CT also mentions some interesting points. Firstly, Bond promises that the animation will be much improved for the next film in the series (which will be called either The Flood or Noah's Ark: The New Beginning). This was perhaps the most widely criticised area of Ten Commandments (my own review), so hopefully the improvement will be significant enough to allay those objections. She also revealed that Ben Kingsley would again feature as the narrator and that this time he would be joined by Michael Keaton, Marcia Gay Harden, and Rob Schneider.