It seems as though we’ve all grown accustomed at this point to the easy assumption that each turn of the calendar year will only bring fresh, renewed horrors to the fabric of American society, but lost in the shuffle of 2024’s grim onset was the following bright kernel of legitimately good news: David Gordon Green stepped down as the supposed director of Universal’s The Exorcist: Deceiver. The sequel to last year’s critically scorned and audience-derided Exorcist: Believer and planned second installment in a full-on trilogy of horror legacy sequels, The Exorcist: Deceiver is now a rudderless project, one likely to receive heavy rewrites if not full-on reimagining before we hear about it again. The only reason it’s still likely to be resurrected in some form in the next few years? That would be the $400 million that Universal and Peacock spent to acquire the franchise rights back in 2021. It’s a classic, modern studio conundrum: It doesn’t matter how terribly a film is received when the IP was expensive. We need to keep cranking out those sequels to recoup the cost!
That economic imperative can’t help but stand in the way of good sense and any fleeting impression that there’s an intention to “respect the original” property. Because in truth, offering deference to the legacy of 1973’s original The Exorcist would be a rather easy thing to do. And it would start with the following: Just stop making these fucking sequels altogether.
William Friedkin’s The Exorcist obviously needs no introduction to film geeks — it’s functionally impossible to fete it in some way that hasn’t already been done a dozen times before. Suffice to say, it occupies a hallowed place in the horror pantheon, where it tops our own list of the 100 best horror films of all time, and is also the rare instance of an undeniable horror movie that transcended popular culture and became a staple of “great film” discourse. That kind of position is almost never afforded to films in this genre — even the likes of say, John Carpenter’s The Thing were widely panned upon release, taking decades to build an improved reputation. The Exorcist, on the other hand, was a genuine social phenomenon upon release, the kind of transgressively shocking cinematic experience that can barely be said to still exist in a more cynical (but somehow more repressed?) society desensitized by the slow-drip newsfeed of daily atrocities we can access on our phones in any off moment. The likes of Jordan Peele’s Get Out may have similarly flown the flag for horror cinema by earning a Best Picture nomination in 2017, but did it truly traumatize audiences like the poor souls fainting in the aisles during The Exorcist? It did not, but in all fairness, nothing can truly replicate the malignant power of Friedkin’s film.
Case in point: David Gordon Green’s often laughable The Exorcist: Believer, a film that attempts to clumsily replicate and modernize the 1973 original’s basic structure while dedicating the majority of its energy to its real priority, which is shameless franchise building. Like so many of the legacy sequels of its era, Green’s own Halloween “trilogy” firmly included, its most deep-seated, primordial failing is the fact that it’s been approached in the first place from the angle of maximum profit extraction. You can’t just make a long-gestating legacy sequel anymore, not in the 2020s. Getting the original stars back for a cameo or two? That’s not good enough; you need to think bigger. Now the film you’re making has no option but to be the start of a three-film cycle, with all the heavy narrative baggage that comes along with that decision. Were you hoping for a self-contained story in Believer, with fully fleshed-out characters or a conclusive ending, perhaps? Sorry, those have all been sacrificed in order to “set things up” for a second and third film, when we’ll surely be rewarded with the real juicy stuff. Unless, you know … those films are also spent “laying foundations” for further spin-offs, until such time as the IP is no longer profitable. As is increasingly the case in the likes of the MCU, the present is continuously sacrificed for the sake of a nebulous future that may never even arrive.
This is the height of arrogance in film production as it exists today, reducing each film in a would-be franchise to a kernel of a complete story that never demanded multiple films to tell in the first place. You can thank Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, perhaps, for having the temerity to first stretch and pad its source material to such impossible lengths, but rather than simply taking an obtuse route to adapting a classic piece of fiction, this is now the model by which franchises are crafted from the ground up. Debate among film fans would have been lively on the initial question of “Do we need another Exorcist film?”, but would anyone other than a studio executive reply with “One more? What we could really use is three more in sequence.” What hope did the first film in a pre-planned series of three Exorcist movies ever have of being in any way satisfying or vital? Is there even a word that accurately captures how clearly wrong this property is for that kind of treatment?
With Green’s exit from The Exorcist: Deceiver, though, we seemingly have some reprieve from whatever shlock the writer-director had carefully charted out on cocktail napkins with co-writer Peter Sattler when they laid out the two following installments, rumored to have been planned as Peacock exclusives. It seems likely that we’ll never quite get a chance to follow up on Green’s half-hearted attempt to broaden the religious background of the series beyond Catholicism, which in Believer largely served to muddy the waters of what exactly demonic possession is, while failing to build any of its would-be holy men into three-dimensional characters. Presumably, we’ll also be spared a next installment where Pazuzu runs amok and possesses an entire town, or the climactic film in which I can only assume that Linda Blair would descend into hell itself to rescue Believer’s unfortunate victim (Exorcist: Retriever?) while punching Pazuzu squarely in his infernal balls. The legacy sequel bible demands it!
With that said, it’s impossible to have a shred of faith — oddly appropriate here — that the eventual return to these properties a couple years down the line will be at all different from the mercenary spirit of Green’s treatment. A best case scenario would perhaps be Universal taking the same route as they did in abandoning the Dark Universe and then pivoting to 2020’s The Invisible Man, a tense and personal psychological horror made for a pittance of $7 million, ultimately taking in more than $144 million at theaters. But that’s just not an option for The Exorcist, thanks to the $400 million elephant in the room. This entire franchise is being powered by liberal application of the sunk cost fallacy, with an already invested price tag that demands legacy sequel blockbuster treatment for properties that would be better served with either genuinely fresh ideas or a more humble and focused approach.
In the end, The Exorcist: Believer is a fine illustration of what happens when you reduce one of the most iconic American films of all time to a parade of references and checked boxes, intent on satisfying members of the marketing department rather than asking, even for a moment, what would best serve the project itself. It’s a deeply cynical attempt at profiteering off the legacy of a film that is now a half-century old, and it’s a compelling argument for why we should stop producing these types of legacy sequels entirely.
In a just world, The Exorcist: Believer would mark the end of an era, the closing of a chapter where we will no longer make the kind of film that brings back a 91-year-old Ellen Burstyn, only to immediately subject her to abject humiliation on screen. It would be the dawn of a new era in which studios and audiences alike come to an agreement that originality and fresh ideas will be rewarded over the rote regurgitation of familiar IP, over and over again.
That’s my dream. But instead, I’ll be tentatively jotting down “The Exorcist: Deceiver Review: Hey Look, More Pea Soup” in my planner for 2025.
Jim Vorel is Paste’s resident genre movie guru. You can follow him on Twitter for much more film content.