A New ‘Exorcist’ Sequel Will Possess Movie Theaters
Those pesky demons working on behalf of Satan, they sure are impossible to get rid of. You exorcise them, you cast them out, then what happens? They come back, over and over again. The Exorcist has already had five movies and a TV series — and now good ol’ Pazuzu is returning to cause all kinds of supernatural trouble once again.
Yes, roughly 50 years since The Exorcist first debuted as a novel by William Peter Blatty, the concept is getting an update for the 2020s. According to Observer, this project is a “sequel” to The Exorcist, not a remake or a reboot. They also report the project is being overseen by Blumhouse and will be directed by David Gordon Green, who is currently finishing Halloween Kills, his second sequel to the original Halloween by John Carpenter.
If all that is accurate, this would be the fourth Exorcist sequel, following 1977’s disastrous (but kind of worth watching) Exorcist II: The Heretic and 1990’s The Exorcist III. The subsequent films were all prequels; 2004’s Exorcist: The Beginning and 2005’s Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist. Technically, the latter was made first, by director Paul Schrader, but when producers disliked his cut, they hired Renny Harlin to replace him and rework the material. When Harlin’s movie failed to strike a nerve with critics and audiences, the studio decided to release Dominion anyway as its own, contradictory prequel. (They both star Stellan Skarsgård as the young Father Merrin from the original film.) A few years later, a sequel series to the original movie simply titled The Exorcist lasted for two seasons on Fox.
That’s a lot of Exorcist stuff, and very little that’s connected with audiences beyond the original, classic film by William Friedkin. David Gordon Green is a skilled director — but then again, so are Paul Schrader and John Boorman, and they struggled with this franchise, too. It’s almost like The Exorcist itself has been cursed like one of its characters.
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