Mel Gibson isn't just picking up where the crucifixion left off. He's leaving the planet.

In a new conversation with Fox News contributor Raymond Arroyo on the Arroyo Grande Show, the director laid out his vision for The Resurrection of the Christ, his two-part sequel to 2004's The Passion of the Christ. And the scope, by his own account, is nothing like the original.

Where the first film stayed locked on the final twelve hours of Jesus's life, shot almost entirely in Aramaic, Hebrew and Latin, the sequel moves. Gibson has previously told The Christian Post that the story will pass through what he calls the firmament before creation, through the hell of the just and the hell of the damned, and will touch on the fall of the angels and the origins of Satan. Heavy stuff, and he isn't hiding from it.

"It takes a pretty broad trip [from] our own broken world to, you know, other realms and stuff with different natures, and connects all of them, I hope, because we're all connected, and we all know we're connected," Gibson told Arroyo.

The other big departure is language. The original film's decision to run almost entirely in dead languages, subtitles and all, became part of its identity. This time Gibson is going with English, and he's got a reason ready.

"You had a focal point, and it was about human suffering," he said of the first film. "That was a rather simpler message to get across, and I think the complexity of an event like the resurrection, which is impossible to comprehend really, one has to delve more into sources."

"I thought it was just silly to make people read subtitles in a foreign language when they were dealing with such heady concepts," he added. "So, it asks more of you, but we help them along with their own language."

Gibson also framed the project as a chance to fill in gaps the Gospels leave open, not to contradict scripture but to build around it.

"One can look at these things and go, 'I wonder what was around that?' and try and analyze those things and make suppositions about what might have been," he said. "Not to go against anything in orthodox teaching but to enhance, I think, what's there for everyone to see, and hopefully they'll be surprised by some of those revelations."

Whether Jim Caviezel returns as Jesus hasn't been addressed in this round of interviews. What's locked in are the dates. The Resurrection of the Christ: Part One is set for May 6, 2027, with Part Two following on May 25, 2028. That's over twenty years after the original landed in theatres and became one of the highest-grossing independent films ever made, controversy and all.

What exactly the hell of the damned looks like on screen, and how a mainstream English-language cut plays with the audience that embraced the Aramaic original, are questions nobody can answer until 2027.