After more than a decade of prayer, six rejected screenplays, and what can only be described as a faith journey in its own right, Half Crown Media — in partnership with OMF International, the organization Hudson Taylor himself founded has officially announced that their film HUDSON & MARIA is going into production. The first press release went out May 6th. Director Matt Mikalatos, a former missionary who also wrote the screenplay, confirmed on his Substack that filming begins this summer in Malaysia, with casting underway right now.
This one has been a long time coming. And from everything I’ve seen, it’s going to be worth every year of waiting.
Who Was Hudson Taylor?
If you don’t know the name, you need to.
James Hudson Taylor was born in Barnsley, Yorkshire, England in 1832. His parents prayed over him before he was born, specifically asking God to send him to China as a missionary. As a teenager he walked away from that faith entirely. But at seventeen, alone in his father’s library, he picked up a gospel tract and read it to the end. That afternoon changed everything.
He started learning Mandarin. He studied medicine. He gave away most of what he owned to the poor, quietly testing whether God could really be trusted to provide. And in 1853, at twenty-one years old, he sailed for China, arriving in Shanghai in the midst of the Taiping Rebellion, stepping off a boat into a country in upheaval, with nothing but a calling he couldn’t shake loose.
What happened next would reshape the entire history of Christian missions.
The Man Who Refused to Stay Foreign
Here’s what made Hudson Taylor unlike virtually every other missionary of his era: he refused to stay an outsider.
While most Western missionaries of the 1800s planted themselves in China’s coastal cities, lived in foreign compounds, dressed in European clothes, and largely moved in circles of other Westerners, Taylor did something that got him mocked by nearly everyone, including his fellow missionaries. He shaved his forehead, grew a queue, put on Chinese clothing, learned the language until he was fluent, and moved into the interior of the country where no foreign missionary had gone.
He was called an embarrassment. A laughingstock. One missionary suggested he “ought to be horsewhipped.” But Taylor was unmoved. He had understood something most of his colleagues had not: that the Chinese people would never hear the Gospel as long as it arrived wearing a British suit.
He said it plainly: “Let us in everything not sinful become like the Chinese, that by all means we may save some.”
In 1865, Taylor founded the China Inland Mission, revolutionary in every way. No guaranteed salaries, just faith and God’s provision. Non-denominational, open to working-class missionaries and single women when no one else would send them. Focused entirely on the unreached interior, the hundreds of millions of souls that coastal missions weren’t reaching. By the time he died in 1905, the CIM had sent more than 800 missionaries to every province in China, planted 300+ mission stations, and seen more than 20,000 Chinese come to faith. Today that organization continues as OMF International, the very organization co-producing this film.
Historian Ruth Tucker has called him the most visionary missionary since the Apostle Paul. The man earned it.
But This Film Is a Love Story
The movie isn’t just a biography of a missionary hero. At its heart, HUDSON & MARIA is a love story and one of the most remarkable ones in the history of the church.
Maria Dyer was born in China to missionary parents. She was everything Hudson hoped for, passionate, deeply faithful, with a courage that matched his own. When he declared his love for her, the entire missionary community in Ningbo erupted. The woman overseeing Maria’s school despised Taylor, thought him uneducated and unconventional, and did everything in her power to stop them, including threatening a lawsuit.
Maria’s response? She drew a line in the sand: “If he loves me more than Jesus, he is not worthy of me — if he were to leave the Lord’s work for the world’s honor, I would have nothing further to do with him.”
They married in 1858, and together they built something extraordinary, facing poverty, illness, the deaths of children, and the sheer weight of a mission that seemed too large for any two people to carry.
The film also introduces a third key character: Wang Laijun, a loyal Chinese friend whose insight bridges cultures, and who represents the Chinese believers who were not merely recipients of the Gospel, but partners in carrying it forward.
A Director Who Knows the Story from the Inside
Matt Mikalatos is a former missionary himself, which is exactly why he was the right person to write this screenplay, and now to direct it.
He told CBN News that the story lands with particular force in today’s world. “There was a lot of unrest, uncertainty in the world,” he said of the film’s historical setting — the era of the Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion. “Disease was running rampant in a way that we have recently experienced. And there was just uncertainty among so many people. In the midst of that, what we see is this 21-year-old and his fiancée and then wife who looked at the unrest of the world and believed, like many young believers do, that they could change the world through their commitment to Christ and their willingness to sacrifice. And it turns out they were absolutely correct.”
Mikalatos also noted on his Substack that this was the first paid screenwriting work he ever did, five years ago and that the path from writing it to now directing it has felt nothing short of “supernatural.” Casting announcements are expected soon.
A Project Built on the Same Faith It Tells
Half Crown Media has been developing this film for over a decade, and the way they’ve done it looks a lot like the way Hudson Taylor did everything: by trusting God to provide rather than chasing the money first.
The total budget is $14 million — $7 million for production, $7 million for distribution, raised entirely through donations, not investment, in keeping with the faith-based DNA of OMF International. They rejected six screenplays over the years before finally connecting with Mikalatos. Their board chair, Dr. Jennie Fung, reflected on the journey in their January 2026 newsletter, describing it as standing on the east bank of the Jordan, years in the wilderness, now on the edge of the Promised Land.
They also note that the film’s production coincides with the 160th anniversary of the Lammermuir Party, the historic voyage in 1866 when Hudson and Maria Taylor, along with sixteen missionaries, sailed for China on a ship called the Lammermuir, the largest single group of missionaries to China at the time, battered by back-to-back typhoons in the Taiwan Strait before arriving safely to begin the work of the CIM. Honoring that anniversary as cameras roll on the story feels like more than coincidence.
As Taylor himself said: “There are three stages to every great work of God: first it is impossible, then it is difficult, then it is done.”
They have arrived at done.
Why This Film Matters
We live in a cultural moment when the church is wrestling with big questions about calling, sacrifice, cultural humility, and what it actually means to follow Jesus into hard places. Hudson and Maria Taylor’s story speaks directly into every one of those conversations.
He wasn’t polished or pedigreed. He was a young man from Yorkshire who said yes, got on a boat, and gave his life away. He dressed differently than everyone expected. He went where no one else would go. He built something that outlasted him by more than a century. And his wife Maria stood beside him at every step, not as a supporting character, but as a full partner in the mission.
That’s a story the church needs to see on a screen.
On-site filming for HUDSON & MARIA begins in Malaysia this August. You can follow the project and sign up for updates at HudsonAndMaria.com, and follow Half Crown Media at halfcrownmedia.com.
Stay tuned here at FaithAndFamilyFlicks.com — as casting is announced and production moves forward, we’ll keep you in the loop. This is one worth praying for and one worth watching for.
Dave Almgren is the founder of The Advance Team and host of the “Two Pastors, Popcorn and a Movie” podcast. He writes regularly about faith-based film at FaithAndFamilyFlicks.com.
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