Before a single frame of The Message had been seen publicly, protests broke out in several countries, most seriously a 1977 armed takeover of buildings in Washington, D.C. by a group demanding the film be destroyed, on the strength of a rumor, never true, that Anthony Quinn would portray Muhammad on screen. The film does nothing of the kind; Quinn plays Hamza, the Prophet's uncle, and Muhammad is never shown.
The controversy nearly buried a film that was, by design, unusually careful about the religious sensitivities it was navigating. Akkad had secured a fatwa of approval from Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the most prominent center of Sunni Islamic scholarship, before production began, precisely to avoid the outcome that nearly happened anyway once a false rumor took on a life of its own ahead of any actual screening.
Decades on, the film's reputation has settled closer to the intention behind it than to the panic that met its announcement. It airs regularly on television across much of the Muslim-majority world, particularly during Ramadan, and is frequently cited, including in retrospective American press coverage on its fortieth anniversary in 2016, as a rare case of a Hollywood-adjacent production that set out to depict a major world religion's origin story from the inside, on that tradition's own terms, and by most accounts succeeded.