‘The Exorcist: Believer’ Tops the Box Office With $45 Million Worldwide Debut; But Is That Enough?

The franchise’s first movie in nearly twenty years, director David Gordon Green’s The Exorcist: Believer arrived on the big screen over the weekend, but how did it perform?

The legacy sequel, the first film in a planned trilogy of movies, topped the box office here in the United States, scaring up $27.2 million in its debut weekend across 3,663 theaters.

Worldwide, The Exorcist: Believer debuted to $45 million, a number that exceeds the reported $30 million production budget of the new movie. But there’s some fine print to that.

The catch? Universal spent $400 million acquiring the rights to The Exorcist, the studio banking on big box office numbers to make the investment worthwhile. It’s likely they hoped to replicate the success of Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy, but that film debuted to $76 million here in the States back in 2018 – almost three times the US debut of Believer. And Halloween 2018, which cost just $10 million to produce, ended its run with $259 million worldwide.

With a tepid opening weekend box office performance – relative to the film’s overall budget – and negative reviews nearly across the board, Universal and Blumhouse’s brand new The Exorcist trilogy isn’t exactly off to a strong start. Which begs an important question this week…

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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