Universal paid $400 million for The Exorcist rights, and The Exorcist: Believer is earning worse reviews than Halloween Ends (2022).
Halloween Ends, a movie I hate more than PBS, earned a 40 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The Exorcist: Believer is getting murdered with just a 22 percent fresh rating.
Exorcist: Believer (Universal Pictures)
The connection between the two is more than a horror genre reboot — it’s the same people: Director/co-writer David Gordon Green and his co-writer Danny McBride. This is the duo responsible for rebooting the Halloween franchise with the okay Halloween (2018), the fabulous Halloween Kills (2021), and The Story of a Dull Boy Named Corey No One Cares About and This Movie and Its Insipid Voice-Over Should Die in a Fire (2022).
So after crash-landing the Halloween franchise into a fireball of lame, Universal paid $400 million so Green and McBride could run a flaccid train on The Exorcist, which is a movie that cannot be franchised.
Max von Sydow in The Exorcist (1973) (Warner Bros.)
The whole idea of franchising The Exorcist is absurd. All you can do is dry-hump the formula over and over and over, which is what all four —four! —sequels prior to Believer did. Granted, I’m a fan of Exorcist III. That was William Peter Blatty’s attempt to do it independently: to write and direct an Exorcist movie. Blatty wrote the novel the original Exorcist (1973) is based on. He also won a well-deserved screenplay Oscar for adapting his book for William Friedkin’s masterpiece. Exorcist III works remarkably well in some places and falls flat in others, but there’s enough good stuff on my Blu-ray Ark.
The other sequels are breathtakingly awful. Allow me to give you an idea of what I mean… I’m a completist. On my Blu-ray Ark (to protect these treasures from America’s woke fascists), I own all the Texas Chainsaws, the first eight Friday the 13ths, all the Psychos, Omens, Phantasms, Halloweens (except that lame-ass Corey one), Aliens, Silent Night, Deadly Nights, Jaws’s, Paranormals, the Hammer Draculas, the Hammer Frankensteins, and anything Vincent Price ever showed up in or George Romero touched. But those Exorcist sequels? No way. Why? Because they have no place to go. It’s the same with the Ghostbusters franchise. All you can do is bust ghosts. Once is enough.
Anyway, the economics of the upcoming Exorcist trilogy are insane. Universal paid $400 million for the rights, which means this trilogy will have to gross close to $800 million just to pay that $400 million back. Add to that the production and promotion budget for the trilogy, which will probably add up to $200 million. So just to break even, Universal has to clear around a billion dollars on a trilogy where the first one, Believer, is looking at a $35 million projected opening.
How bad is that? Halloween opened to $76 million in 2019. Halloween Kills (2021) opened to $49 million. The Corey One That Sucks Like a Black Hole (2022) managed to open to $20 million even though you could stream it that same day.
The only way to succeed in Hollywood is to fail up.
You want to see a truly great David Gordon Green movie? Right here.
John Nolte’s debut novel Borrowed Time is available to order, including Kindle and Audible. Amazon reviews are appreciated and helpful.