Two uniformed men stand behind a gurney with orange hoods pulled over their heads, while the man strapped down in front of them stares straight ahead with his arms buckled to padded boards and a blood pressure cuff wrapped around one of them. That man is Father Sunday (John Leguizamo), a serial killer waiting on his execution. The frame is one of seven first look stills that Universal and Blumhouse released through Esquire on Tuesday for Mike Flanagan’s “Exorcist” film, which finally has an official title, “The Exorcist: Martyrs”. The hoods are not a stylistic flourish. Flanagan told Esquire that his team learned this occasionally happens, and that “people who participate in these executions will make these masks to protect their anonymity.”
The film, which Flanagan wrote and directed, opens in theaters on March 12th, 2027. A 15-second teaser went up on the movie’s official X account the same night, closing on a card that promises the full trailer this Friday. Detective Julie Miller (Scarlett Johansson) is an NYPD homicide detective and a single mother to Max (Jacobi Jupe), who Flanagan says has “just turned 12 years old.” Her own mother, Mary (Diane Lane), picks up the slack when a case keeps Julie away for days at a time. Julie arrests Father Sunday “very early in the story,” Flanagan said, and she is in the room to witness his execution, “which doesn’t go exactly as they expect it to.” Warning beyond this point there are mild spoilers for the setup Flanagan described to Esquire.
Two uniformed men stand behind a gurney with orange hoods pulled over their heads, while the man strapped down in front of them stares straight ahead with his arms buckled to padded boards and a blood pressure cuff wrapped around one of them.”
Father Sunday’s method is the ugly part. According to Esquire, his signature was staging bloody crime scenes that recreate the martyrdoms of individual Roman Catholic saints, killings designed to shatter the faith of the people who followed his victims. “That iconography’s right there,” Flanagan said of the crime scenes his team staged for the trailer. His death does not end the killing, either. Julie goes back to work with a fellow homicide detective, Gina Restrepo (Sasha Calle). One still puts the two of them in a tiled morgue, standing over a body under a sheet, while an examiner in blue gloves leans over an arm, crosshatched with dark cuts, that sticks out from under the cloth.
Then come the priests. Father William (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is, in Flanagan’s words, “a career prison chaplain, who presided over the execution of Father Sunday,” and who “in the years that have gone by since that execution, has found himself in a vocational crisis, a crisis of faith.” That line also tells us the story jumps forward after the execution, though Universal has not said by how much. Ejiofor’s still is the most formal of the set, with the priest standing at an altar in a purple chasuble embroidered in gold, his arms open, framed by tall candles and carved Gothic woodwork. Laurence Fishburne plays a second priest, one familiar with ancient rituals, who is brought in once the killings get too close to Julie’s mother and son.
Max gets a still of his own, a boy in glasses and a camouflage jacket caught in a dark room with his mouth hanging open. The teaser shows Jupe scrambling backward across a hallway floor. The image Esquire led with shows a woman with long hair standing in a dim room, half her face lit by a slash of yellow light, looking at someone whose head blurs out of focus in the foreground, and Esquire does not say who she is. Another shows Johansson in her NYPD uniform, walking down a prison cellblock with a fluorescent light overhead. The teaser itself is 15 seconds of fragments. It runs from a dark staircase under Flanagan’s writer and director credit to a woman pointing a flashlight into the black, then to a crowd of protesters behind steel barricades holding up a sign that reads “ONLY GOD MAY JUDGE” while men in jackets marked “TROOPER” hold the line. Near the end, a small figure runs down the middle of a wet road at night, between lanes of traffic.
Flanagan is open about the recipe. “How can we explore those ideas in a serial-killer thriller in a way that starts to combine these subgenres a little, that takes what we love about a movie like Se7en or The Silence of the Lambs and combines it with what we love about a movie like The Exorcist?” he told Esquire. The obvious ancestor is “The Exorcist III”, which William Peter Blatty directed in 1990 from his own novel “Legion”, a story about a detective investigating murders that carry the hallmarks of a dead serial killer. Flanagan called the book “a wonderful novel.” He also knows what the title owes the audience. “It does have that one job from the title,” he joked, before promising a possession that moves “out of the bedroom and out of parental torment and into something much, much bigger.”
The studio math is where this gets interesting. NBCUniversal, Peacock and Blumhouse paid Morgan Creek $400 million for the rights in July 2021, according to Deadline. The plan was a trilogy from David Gordon Green, the director behind Blumhouse’s recent “Halloween” trilogy. The first chapter, “The Exorcist: Believer”, opened in October 2023, sits at 22% on Rotten Tomatoes, drew a “C” CinemaScore and finished with about $136 million worldwide. Green walked away from the follow up, “The Exorcist: Deceiver”, in January 2024, and it lost its April 2025 date. By May of that year, Blumhouse had Flanagan writing, directing and producing what its announcement called “a radical new take”, billed as “an all-new story set in The Exorcist universe” and not a sequel to “Believer” at all.
Our read is that Universal did the one thing a $400 million purchase hates to do, which is stop and start again. Every choice since then looks built to avoid a second miss. The film gave up a March 2026 date so Flanagan could finish his “Carrie” series for Prime Video first, and that series arrives this week. The name above the title belongs to a star from “The Avengers”, and the edges are filled with Flanagan’s own repertory company, among them Rahul Kohli, Kate Siegel, Samantha Sloyan, Carla Gugino and Hamish Linklater, with Michael Fimognari behind the camera. Cameras rolled from March to June. Nothing of Green’s connective tissue survives, and “The Exorcist III” is a strange model to pick, since Esquire notes its cult following came despite its flaws. This could be the smartest bet the franchise has made in decades. It might also be a crime thriller with an Exorcist label stapled on, and that is the risk.
Flanagan’s own pitch is that nobody should expect the old movie. “I think the first job is to tell people they’re not seeing a retread of The Exorcist,” he said. “They’re not seeing any attempt to reboot or remake or to step into the Friedkin film.” The title has been floating around since June, when it surfaced on the website of his company, Red Room Pictures. What was missing until this week was any sense of what the movie is about. He and Ejiofor are booked for Blumhouse’s BlumFest panel at New York Comic Con on Friday night, the same day the trailer lands, and that trailer is probably where the saints show up.
What Do You Think? Is a serial-killer procedural the right way to bring “The Exorcist” back? Does the nod to “The Exorcist III” make you more excited or more nervous? And after “Believer”, would you buy a ticket on Flanagan’s name alone?
See you on the next binge!
