Made on a budget of $18 million, the supernatural thriller The Pope’s Exorcist (read our review HERE), which stars Russell Crowe as real-life exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth, has racked up over $52 million at the global box office since its release earlier this month. Columbia Pictures / Screen Gems must be very satisfied with how well the movie is doing, because our friends at Bloody Disgusting have been informed that a sequel to The Pope’s Exorcist is now in early development!
Details on the sequel aren’t available yet, but it looks like Crowe is going to have a rematch with the forces of evil.
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), who passed away in 2016 at the age of 91. 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.” So it sounds like they’ll have plenty of material to pull ideas from as they develop the sequel to The Pope’s Exorcist.
For The Pope’s Exorcist, 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 oversaw the project for Screen Gems. The film was 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.
Have you seen The Pope’s Exorcist, and are you interested in seeing a sequel to the film? Share your thoughts on this one by leaving a comment below.