It seems Sony and Screen Gems are looking to piggyback on the meteoric success of New Line’s Conjuring film franchise and its many spooky spinoffs.
According to Deadline, the studios have landed the exclusive life rights of Father Gabriele Amorth, a renown Italian priest who is said to have performed tens of thousands of exorcisms in his lifetime on behalf of the Vatican. Tapping inspiration from his two best-selling memoirs, An Exorcist Tells His Story and An Exorcist: More Stories, the inevitable feature film will likely employ the tried-and-tested “based on real events” before playing in theaters, which worked wonders for the likes of The Amityville Horror, The Haunting in Connecticut and The Conjuring.
Father Amorth, meanwhile, passed away in 2016, though his detailed battle with evil was the subject of William Friedkin’s new documentary, The Devil and Father Amorth, from last year, and we imagine its popularity had something to do with Sony’s decision to lock down those exclusive rights.
On script duties for the Father Gabriele Amorth movie is Jeff Katz, who’s writing a story based on his own treatment. He’ll executive produce the project, too, alongside Edward Siebert and Michael Patrick Kaczmarek, who had purportedly been making a case to land Amorth’s “life rights, personal writings and case files” for years prior to today’s announcement. So we simply can’t wait to see what’s in store.
Next up for New Line and its Conjuring series, meanwhile, is Corin Hardy’s The Nun, which is poised to unleash unholy terror upon the moviegoing masses on September 7th – exactly one week before Shane Black and Fred Dekker summon The Predator into theaters.
