Martin Scorsese has signed a deal with Fox Nation, the streaming platform for Fox News Media, to host, narrate, and executive produce an eight-episode docudrama titled Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints.
The religious series is set to release in two parts, debuting on Nov. 16, and running through May 2025. Each episode will dramatize the liife of a different saint, including Joan of Arc, Francis of Assisi, John the Baptist, Thomas Becket, Mary Magdalene, Moses the Black, Sebastian, and Maximillian Kolbe. Per a press release, the series is billed as an exploration of “the remarkable stories of eight men and women who risked everything to embody humanity’s most noble and complex trait — faith.”
Scorsese is the latest high-voltage Hollywood name to join the Fox Nation team, joining Kevin Costner (Yellowstone: One-Fifty), Rob Lowe (Liberty or Death: Boston Tea Party), and Dan Aykroyd (A History Of The World In Six Glasses).
The Oscar-winning director has focused his lens on Christianity throughout much of his work, and his controversial 1988 film, The Last Temptation of Christ, drew backlash from religious groups over its portrayal of Jesus grabbling with human desires, doubts, and his own divinity.
Following the premiere of Killers of the Flower Moon, Scorsese told the Los Angeles Times in January that he met with Pope Francis and “responded to the pope’s appeal to artists in the only way I know how: by imagining and writing a screenplay for a film about Jesus.” Based on Japanese writer Shusaku Endo’s book A Life of Jesus, the director said the film would depict Jesus’s teachings and will be mostly set in the present day.
“Right now, ‘religion,’ you say that word and everyone is up in arms because it’s failed in so many ways,” Scorsese told the LA Times. “But that doesn’t mean necessarily that the initial impulse was wrong. Let’s get back. Let’s just think about it. You may reject it. But it might make a difference in how you live your life — even in rejecting it. Don’t dismiss it offhand. That’s all I’m talking about. And I’m saying that as a person who’s going to be 81 in a couple of days. You know what I’m saying?”
Rick Yorn, a producer on several of Scorsese’s projects and Leonardo DiCaprio’s manager, is among The Saints’ executive producers.
