The religious avengers team up to exorcise a possessed girl in The Exorcist Believer
By
Alex Harrison
Published 8 minutes ago
Alex is the Senior Movies Editor, managing the New Movies team, as well as one of ScreenRant's Rotten Tomatoes-approved critics. After graduating from Brown University with a B.A. in English, he spent a locked-down year in Scotland completing a Master's in Film Studies from the University of Edinburgh, which he hears is a nice, lively city. He now lives in and works from Milan, Italy, conveniently a short train ride from the Venice Film Festival, which he first covered for SR in 2024.
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The Exorcist: Believer was a unique kind of Hollywood embarrassment. Universal purchased the rights to the franchise for $400 million in 2021 and re-teamed with Blumhouse for a planned trilogy of new films. Together with filmmaker David Gordon Green, they ran their Halloween playbook: Make a direct sequel to the original movie, ignoring any previous installments, with a mix of new and returning stars.
Lightning didn't strike twice. 2018's Halloween requel made almost $260 million on a $10 million budget; 2023's Believer cost $30 million and made $137 million. Not a bad result on the face of it, but when paired with the rights price tag and a 22% Rotten Tomatoes score, certainly not the series relaunch the studio was looking for.
Usually, when that happens, everyone can just move on, as Universal once did with its plans for a Dark Universe of its classic monster properties. But The Exorcist franchise cost them too much to just abandon. So, even though they face an uphill battle of convincing audiences they got it right this time, another reboot is on the way. (The remaining two sequels of Believer's storyline are, alas, no more.)
As someone who saw and hated Believer, I went from firmly out on the new film to intrigued when Mike Flanagan was announced as the new Exorcist reboot's director. But I'm starting to worry the studio didn't really learn the necessary lesson from their failed first attempt.
The Exorcist Reboot Has One Job, And One Job Only
Yesterday, Deadline broke that Scarlett Johansson is set to star in the new Exorcist film, becoming its first cast member. She is, on the face of it, a huge get. The two-time Oscar nominee and former Avenger is not only a talented actor, but the highest-grossing female star in movie history. As Universal itself learned this summer with Jurassic World Rebirth, which cruised to over $800 million worldwide to become 2024's fourth-highest-grossing movie so far, any franchise is lucky to have her on its posters.
And that's exactly what's making me nervous.
The biggest problem with The Exorcist: Believer was its attempt to treat itself as a big-deal franchise film, at the expense of telling a horror story of its own. The execution of this lore-building, it must be said, was poor – but the mistake was that it was done at all, not merely done badly.
2018's Halloween smartly tapped into a sense of unfinished business around Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie Strode and the masked killer Michael Myers. 2022's Scream is part of an endlessly self-reflexive series that pulls from the current trends defining the horror genre. These are franchises that make natural fits for the "requel" treatment, with lasting iconography and long-running characters viewers have built relationships with.
The Exorcist may have spawned sequels, but the original is famous for one thing above all: being scary. Invoke Halloween and people expect a relentless masked killer terrorizing suburbia. Slap Scream on your poster and people will be expecting clever genre satire with their slasher thrills. But if you claim to be rebooting The Exorcist, people will walk into the theater expecting to be frightened out of their minds.
When Flanagan was hired, I thought Universal had realized their mistake. He is a true horror technician, and while he often veers into heartfelt territory, he can craft scares with the best of them. One viscerally upsetting scene in Doctor Sleep alone proves he's an ideal fit for a franchise defined by on-screen child endangerment.
Johansson could very well be great in a true horror film (this is being reported as a career first for her, which suggests more people still need to see 2013's Under the Skin), but after her casting, I have to question the project's intentions. If the studio tries to broaden The Exorcist into something seemingly more appealing to a larger audience, they'd be forgetting that the original grossed over $440 million in 1973. And The Conjuring series, which may very well be a North Star here, was built on a single film with some of the most effective scares of the 2010s.
If people are going to embrace another Exorcist, it can't try and contort itself to look like whatever Hollywood thinks a franchise movie is supposed to be. It just needs to be terrifying.
The Exorcist (1973) Movie Poster
The Exorcist
Created by
William Peter Blatty
First Film
The Exorcist
Latest Film
The Exorcist: Believer
Upcoming Films
The Exorcist: Deceiver
First TV Show
The Exorcist
Latest TV Show
The Exorcist
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The Exorcist: Deceiver
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The Exorcist - Franchise
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