Universal opting to spend an eye-watering $400 million solely to secure the distribution rights caught everybody off-guard, but it remains to be seen if that investment proves to be justified ahead of The Exorcist: Believer possessing theaters this weekend.
For one thing, announcing intentions for a trilogy right off the bat is always a risky move regardless of how iconic the IP in question is, with matters hardly being helped by the legacy sequel taking a complete and utter pasting from critics. It doesn’t matter in the slightest whether or not you buy into the conspiracy swirling around the seminal original, a 24 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of writing isn’t great.
Not only that, but Jason Blum’s all-powerful Blumhouse is releasing another horror movie on the exact same day, which won’t even sniff the inside of a multiplex but is faring infinitely better among critics. Totally Killer – set in the same genre from the same producer and debuting on the same day as Believer – is packing an 82 percent score on the aggregation site at this moment in time, which is a massive 241 percent ahead of the first installment in planned Exorcist revival.
A time traveling, murder mystery, whodunit, slasher with a subversive streak of self-awareness, nobody could have predicted that the unassuming Kiernan Shipka-starrer would blow what’s poised to be at least a half-billion dollar enterprise should the trilogy make it to the finish line out of the water and into the stratosphere in terms of acclaim, but that’s where we find ourselves.