“Beyond the Mask” Faith-Based Film Set to Smash All Records, Largest “Theater-on-Demand” Release in History
A $4 million faith-based movie made largely by 400 volunteers from the homeschooling community is hoping to open April 6 on as many as 1,100 screens, far more than needed to set a record for the largest on-demand theatrical opening.
The film, called Beyond the Mask and starring John Rhys-Davies, is a faith-based action-adventure movie. It’s set in Colonial America and, while fiction, includes some historical facts and figures, like the signing of the Declaration of Independence and scenes involving the likes of Benjamin Franklin. It was the historical aspect that drew Rhys-Davies to the project.
“I love history, and there’s a lot of shared history that America and Britain have,” said the Welsh actor. “It’s an exciting story with wonderful historical elements.”
The plot involves a mercenary for the British East India Company — which producer Aaron Burns calls “the first too-big-to-fail multinational company to get special favors from the government” — who is on the run and trying to rehabilitate his reputation after having been double-crossed. Rhys-Davies plays the heavy in the film, and he clearly has an affinity for America’s earliest heroes.
“Ben Franklin is one of the most fortuitously happy of men,” he said while in New Zealand filming The Shannara Chronicles, an upcoming fantasy series from MTV. “Franklin is thoughtful and well-read, and his contemporaries are the most stimulating bunch of young Englishmen ever to have left the British Isles. Those Founding Fathers of yours — you think of Pericles in Athens. Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, Washington — they are an extraordinary class of very great men who can get on with each other and change the world.” (Read more from “John Rhys-Davies’ Faith-Based Film Aims to Top ‘Theater-on-Demand’ Release Record” HERE)
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