Over the weekend, David Gordon Green’s legacy sequel The Exorcist: Believer passed a big milestone at the worldwide box office, officially crossing the $100 million landmark.
Worldwide, The Exorcist: Believer has thus far scared up a total of $107.5 million in its 17 days of release, $54.2 million of which was made here in the United States.
For the sake of comparison, Gordon Green’s Halloween Ends, the final part of a trilogy of legacy sequels, finished its worldwide run with $104.3 million last Halloween season.
The reported production budget for The Exorcist: Believer was in the ballpark of $30 million, meaning it’s now turning a profit in theaters. The catch? Universal spent $400 million acquiring the rights to The Exorcist, so it’s a bit complicated to measure the success of this one.
There’s no doubt Universal and Blumhouse hoped that The Exorcist: Believer would kick off this new trilogy with as much success as Halloween in 2018, but that film finished its worldwide run with a whopping $259.9 million. Such a strong start guaranteed that the trilogy plans would come to fruition, but the future isn’t looking quite as bright for The Exorcist.
Financials aside, The Exorcist: Believer has kicked off its planned trilogy with largely negative reviews, which further calls into question the longevity of this particular approach.
As far as we’ve heard, two sequels to The Exorcist: Believer are still being planned – though whether or not Gordon Green returns to direct is up in the air – with The Exorcist: Deceiver already dated for release on April 18, 2025. It’s possible these next two movies could release straight-to-Peacock, which might be a smart plan of attack for the trilogy going forward.
Stay tuned as we learn more on the future of The Exorcist franchise.
Here’s the full plot synopsis for The Exorcist: Believer…
“Since the death of his pregnant wife in a Haitian earthquake 12 years ago, Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom, Jr.) has raised their daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett) on his own.
“But when Angela and her friend Katherine (Olivia Marcum) disappear in the woods, only to return three days later with no memory of what happened, it unleashes a chain of events that will force Victor to confront the nadir of evil and, in his terror and desperation, seek out the only person alive who has witnessed anything like it before: Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn).”
Peter Sattler (Broken Diamonds) and Gordon Green wrote the script for Believer, which features a story by Green, Scott Teems (Halloween Kills) and Danny McBride (Halloween).
The Exorcist franchise hasn’t been on the big screen since the 2005 release of Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist, an alternate version of the previous year’s Exorcist: The Beginning. Those films came in the wake of 1977’s The Exorcist II: The Heretic and 1990’s The Exorcist III.
More recently, “The Exorcist” became a short-lived television series at Fox, which was surprisingly excellent and cleverly took place in the same world as the original classic.
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