Every long-running horror franchise will inevitably succumb to the law of diminishing returns with each passing sequel, remake or reboot, and as one of the greatest movies in the history of the genre, the only way following The Exorcist was down.
William Friedkin’s classic original was the first horror film to be nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards and was a global phenomenon, raking in over $440 million at the box office as audiences turned up in huge numbers to see if it lived up to the hype, and it reigned as the highest-grossing R-rated title of all-time until it was surpassed by the diametrically opposite Pretty Woman seventeen years later.
Two sequels were arrived in 1977 and 1990, before the bizarre case of Exorcist: The Beginning and Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist fifteen years later essentially saw the same movie released twice in two very different forms, neither of which were particularly good. Back in August, though, it was announced that Blumhouse were tackling a reboot that would act as a direct continuation of the story told in the first installment, and some fans weren’t too thrilled at the idea.
Still, discarding canon and picking up where a beloved horror left off worked out pretty well for the studio when they reinvented Halloween, so it didn’t come as much surprise when David Gordon Green reportedly entered talks to direct the project, presumably in the hopes that lightning would strike twice.
Now, insider Daniel Richtman is claiming that the new spin on The Exorcist will be designed as the first part of a trilogy, and while he offers no further details on what we might see, with Blumhouse and Green at the helm, it makes since that they’d stick pretty close to the formula that brought such success for Halloween and head down a similar route.
