{"id":311987,"date":"2025-11-25T03:03:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-25T03:03:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/311987\/"},"modified":"2025-11-25T03:03:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-25T03:03:07","slug":"scarlett-johansson-to-star-in-mike-flanagans-new-exorcist-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/311987\/","title":{"rendered":"Scarlett Johansson to star in Mike Flanagan’s new ‘Exorcist’ movie"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Exorcist<\/a> franchise has summoned forth another star.\n<\/p>\n

Scarlett Johansson<\/a> has officially been tapped to lead the latest entry in the demon-slaying film series that began with the 1973 Oscar winner starring Ellen Burstyn.\n<\/p>\n

“Scarlett is a brilliant actress whose captivating performances always feel grounded and real, from genre films to summer blockbusters, and I couldn\u2019t be happier to have her join this\u00a0Exorcist\u00a0film,” said Mike Flanagan<\/a>, the film’s writer and director, in a Monday press release.<\/p>\n

Lidya Jewett and Olivia O’Neill in ‘The Exorcist: Believer’.<\/p>\n

Universal Pictures<\/p>\n

The as-yet unnamed film, which will be the franchise’s seventh from as many directors in just over 50 years, is set to shoot in New York City. Monday’s release stresses that Flanagan’s film will “tell an all-new story set in\u00a0The Exorcist\u00a0universe and is not a sequel to 2023’s\u00a0The Exorcist: Believer<\/a>.”\n<\/p>\n

Studios Universal and Blumhouse are likely eager to distance themselves from Believer. Though the film’s lifetime global gross of roughly $137 million well exceeded its estimated budget of $30 million, Universal and its streaming partner, Peacock, announced in 2021<\/a> that they’d acquired the rights to develop three new Exorcist films for the price of $400 million.\n<\/p>\n

A combination of financial underperformance (for comparison, Five Nights at Freddy’s, released by Blumhouse weeks after Believer, grossed a whopping $291 million at the global box office) and scathing critical reviews prompted Believer director David Gordon Green to depart<\/a> ahead of the next planned installment in the trilogy. Universal subsequently pulled that film from its release calendar, and eventually scrapped the entire trilogy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Flanagan has earned a reputation as one of the best reviewed horror directors and most distinct writers in the genre. But his box office track record is a bit mixed and muddled.\n<\/p>\n

Many of Flanagan’s most acclaimed projects have been TV series like The Haunting of Hill House, or direct-to-streaming films like Gerald’s Game. Of his films that have released in theaters, some have been hits, like 2016’s Ouija: Origin of Evil, which grossed $81 million globally on a $9 million budget. But then there’s the Shining riff Doctor Sleep, which only raised $72 million against a sizable $45 million budget in 2018.\n<\/p>\n

But he’s up for the challenge, describing his Exorcist movie<\/a> in September as “the scariest movie I’ve ever made.”\n<\/p>\n

Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our\u00a0EW Dispatch newsletter<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

Casting Johansson is certainly to the film’s advantage, as she helped bring the Jurassic Park franchise back to the winner’s table earlier this year with Jurassic World Rebirth. That film launched to the top of the leaderboard in July with a massive $318 million global opening take, and has since grossed a total of $868 million on a budget estimated between $180-225 million.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Exorcist franchise has summoned forth another star. Scarlett Johansson has officially been tapped to lead the latest…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":311988,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,206],"class_list":{"0":"post-311987","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311987\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/311988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}