The franchise’s first movie in 20 years, The Exorcist: Believer is now playing in theaters nationwide, the first film in a planned trilogy of legacy sequels from Universal, Blumhouse, and Morgan Creek, and director David Gordon Green (Halloween). The film opened in many theaters last night for Thursday previews, and the first box office numbers have arrived.
The Exorcist: Believer scared up $2.85 million on Thursday night here in the United States, opening last night in 3,050 theaters. It expands to 3,663 theaters beginning today.
Deadline notes that the film is “on its way to a potential high $20M to $30M.”
For the sake of comparison, the well-received Saw X sliced into $2 million last Thursday night, and the film went on to make $18.3 million across its opening weekend. So it’s pretty safe to expect that The Exorcist: Believer will make its way to at least $20 million in the coming days.
The catch? Universal spent a whopping $400 million acquiring the rights to The Exorcist, with the production cost for The Exorcist: Believer itself reaching $30 million. Universal is banking big on the planned trilogy being a big time money-maker in the long run, but they have to be concerned in the wake of harsh reviews and what looks to be a modest opening weekend.
Will they continue forward as planned or prematurely pull the plug on The Exorcist Trilogy? Only time will tell. Stay tuned for more box office reporting in the coming days.
Here’s the full plot synopsis for The Exorcist: Believer…
“Since the death of his pregnant wife in a Haitian earthquake 12 years ago, Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom, Jr.) has raised their daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett) on his own.
“But when Angela and her friend Katherine (Olivia Marcum) disappear in the woods, only to return three days later with no memory of what happened, it unleashes a chain of events that will force Victor to confront the nadir of evil and, in his terror and desperation, seek out the only person alive who has witnessed anything like it before: Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn).”
Peter Sattler (Broken Diamonds) and Gordon Green wrote the script for Believer, which features a story by Green, Scott Teems (Halloween Kills) and Danny McBride (Halloween).
The Exorcist franchise hasn’t been on the big screen since the 2005 release of Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist, an alternate version of the previous year’s Exorcist: The Beginning. Those films came in the wake of 1977’s The Exorcist II: The Heretic and 1990’s The Exorcist III.
More recently, “The Exorcist” became a short-lived television series at Fox, which was surprisingly excellent and cleverly took place in the same world as the original classic.
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