Columbia Pictures / Screen Gems will be releasing The Pope’s Exorcist, a supernatural thriller starring Russell Crowe, on April 14th, and the movie just took an important step on its journey to theatre screens: it has earned a rating from the Motion Picture Association. That rating is an R, which it received for “violent content, language, sexual references, and some nudity.”
A few years ago, The Exorcist director William Friedkin made a documentary about Father Gabriele Amorth (and you can read our review of The Devil and Father Amorth at THIS LINK), a real-life exorcist who passed away in 2016 at the age of 91. Crowe is playing Father Amorth in The Pope’s Exorcist.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Screen Gems acquired the rights to tell the story of the exorcist’s life from Michael Patrick Kaczmarek and faith-based media company Loyola Productions. That deal included rights to Amorth’s two international bestselling memoirs An Exorcist Tells His Story and An Exorcist: More Stories, as well as other “detailed accounts of his exploits of pulling the devil out of people all over the world.” Crowe takes on the role of real-life figure Father Gabriele Amorth, a priest who acted as chief exorcist of the Vatican and who performed more than 100,000 exorcisms in his lifetime. Amorth wrote two memoirs and detailed his experiences battling Satan and demons that had clutched people in their evil.
Overlord‘s Julius Avery directed The Pope’s Exorcist from a screenplay by Evan Spiliotopoulos, with revisions by Chuck MacLean. The script was based on original drafts by Chester Hastings & R. Dean McCreary, which received revisions from Michael Petroni.
Crowe is joined in the cast by Alex Essoe (Starry Eyes), Daniel Zovatto (It Follows), Laurel Marsden (Ms. Marvel), Cornell S. John (Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald), and newcomer Peter DeSouza-Feighoney, with Franco Nero, star of the original Django, as the Pope. Ralph Ineson (The Witch) provides the voice of a demon.
Scott Strauss, Michael Bitar, and Giselle Johnson are overseeing this project for Screen Gems. The film is being produced by Michael Patrick Kaczmarek through his company Jesus & Mary, Loyola president Eddie Siebert, Doug Belgrad of 2.0 Entertainment, and Jeff Katz of Worldwide Katz.
Are you looking forward to The Pope’s Exorcist? What do you think of the fact that it has been given an R rating? Let us know by leaving a comment below.