Now that The Passion has been the top grossing movie for a few weekends in a row, expect a series of summer movies that’ll be ripping it off:

Carved in Stone

A remake of The Ten Commandments – except that, like The Passion, it’s a more physically realistic portrayal of the story – showing the crippling conditions that result when you carry stone tablets around and you’ve lifted them with our back instead of your knees.

Also, like The Passion, the movie is likely to stir resentment – mainly among Muslim extremists who live in the region where the Jews wandered through the desert. The reason this will inflame these religious fanatics is that, frankly, what doesn’t?

The Compound

Chronicles the last 12 hours of David Koresh’s life. Just as some people thought The Passion encouraged anti-Semitism, some critics may claim that this movie sirs prejudice against tall, vaguely mannish attorneys general.

Nine Lives

It’s the last 80 years of Buddha’s life – but as an action film. For example, Siddhartha Buddha learns to take the middle path because there are snipers on both sides of him. And when he discovers the key to enlightenment under the Bo-tree, he does it by slapping around a witness who had known what the key was all along but had been playing dumb all this time.

The only possible protest against this movie is that it might encourage prejudice against the transitory pleasures of the material world.