Box office: The Exorcist finds fewer believers than expected

The latest horror semi-reboot had a weaker opening than the Scream and Halloween revivals, and a weaker opening than the latest installments of Insidious and The Nun.

Ellen Burstyn returns as Chris MacNeil in The Exorcist: Believer.

The newest Exorcist movie didn’t quite have the power to compel people to go to the theatre this weekend.

With no other new movies in wide release, The Exorcist: Believer easily topped the box-office chart between Thursday and Sunday nights, but it earned only $27.2 million according to studio estimates, falling significantly short of the $30 million to $36 million that some experts had predicted going into the weekend.

Various theories have been proposed for the film’s underperformance:

• The reviews, and the social media buzz that followed, were terrible.

• The actors’ strike: None of the actors were allowed to promote the film, and this may have been a particular disadvantage in the case of Ellen Burstyn, who returned to the franchise for the first time since starring in the original film 50 years ago and could have given some good interviews about the reasons for her return, how working on the franchise was different now, etc., etc.

• The last-minute change to the film’s release date: The film was originally going to come out next week, on Friday the 13th—just a couple weeks before Halloween, and an ideal date for a horror movie in any case—but then Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, a concert movie that is currently tracking to open over $100 million, claimed that date a few weeks ago, and The Exorcist jumped out of the way.

• It’s just not that kind of horror movie: Unlike the Saw, Halloween, and Conjuring franchises, which have almost never gone more than a few years without a sequel or spin-off or reboot, the Exorcist franchise has endured very long gaps between movies—13 years between 1977’s Exorcist II: The Heretic and 1990’s The Exorcist III, another 14 years until 2004’s Exorcist: The Beginning, and now it’s been 18 years since 2005’s Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist—so those other series have a certain built-in momentum that the Exorcist franchise arguably doesn’t have.

  • It doesn’t help that the Exorcist films have never agreed on what direction to take the franchise—either chronologically or tonally.

    • Chronologically: There have now been two sequels, two prequels, and a sequel that also had flashbacks that functioned like a prequel, and none of these films agree on what happened before or after the original film. The impression one gets is not of a franchise that has achieved some sort of longevity, but of many false starts in a vain attempt to keep a piece of intellectual property alive… kind of like the last four Terminator movies.

    • Tonally: The original film is remembered for its shock value, but it was also driven by a very serious interest in the problem of evil and the nature of faith in the face of modernity, and it’s not clear that any of the sequels or prequels have even wanted to balance thoughtfulness and sensationalism the way the first film did. Some of them have leaned in a more cerebral… and boring… direction, while others have been more visceral... and cheesy… and this has diluted the brand’s “identity”.

  • Plus, the actual exorcists of the original film died in that movie, so who do the sequels follow? Who’s the character that links the films? The victim from the original film? (Does she get possessed again?) The demon who victimized her? Her mother, who was little more than an innocent bystander? The cop who investigated the case? And who will the new exorcists be? You have to have actual exorcists in a movie with the word “exorcist” in the title, right?

    • You might think that the Exorcist movies could revolve around their main villain, the way a lot of horror franchises do. But the demon in these films is largely invisible and manifests itself through the people it possesses, so these films lack the recurring iconic presence of a Jason Voorhees, a Freddy Krueger, a Michael Myers, an Annabelle, and so on.

In any case, whatever the reasons for its underperformance, The Exorcist: Believer was the only new film in wide release this week.

It was also one of five spooky and/or horror-oriented movies in the top ten, along with holdovers from September like Saw X, A Haunting in Venice, and The Nun II, plus the 30th-anniversary re-release of the witch-y comedy Hocus Pocus.

And now, a few more stats and facts re: this week’s top ten, title by title: