Blumhouse released the first trailer for The Exorcist: Martyrs on Friday, confirming a March 12, 2027 theatrical release. Written and directed by Mike Flanagan, the film stars Scarlett Johansson as Detective Julie Miller, who ends the killing spree of a satanic priest known as Father Sunday, played by John Leguizamo, only to be pulled back into the case 13 years later when a new murder leaves her name written in blood inside a church crypt.
The ensemble includes Chiwetel Ejiofor as Father William, a former prison chaplain who joins Miller’s investigation, alongside Laurence Fishburne, Sasha Calle as rookie Detective Gina Restrepo, Diane Lane, Jacobi Jupe, Scoot McNairy, and Gil Bellows. The investigation traces a thread connecting killers across history, including H.H. Holmes, the Night Stalker, and the Zodiac. David Robinson and Jason Blum produce, with Alexandra Magistro and Ryan Turek executive producing.
The film arrives as Universal’s attempt to salvage a franchise that’s struggled since the studio paid $400 million for the rights in 2021. David Gordon Green’s 2023 revival, The Exorcist: Believer, underperformed critically and commercially despite bringing back original star Ellen Burstyn, and a planned sequel was scrapped the following year. Flanagan, known for horror work including Doctor Sleep, Midnight Mass, and The Fall of the House of Usher, now takes over as the franchise’s new creative lead, with the project built around characters originally created by The Exorcist author William Peter Blatty.
This marks the second time in four years that Universal has handed creative control of this particular franchise to a different filmmaker after a prior attempt failed to connect, a pattern that reflects how studios manage valuable but underperforming IP: rather than abandoning a franchise outright, ownership of its creative direction gets reassigned until something works. For an industry that often treats access to major studio tentpoles as scarce and closely guarded, watching a $400 million property get a full creative reset twice within half a decade says something about how differently that access gets extended once a property is already owned.
With Universal already having scrapped one planned sequel in this franchise, the real question heading into March is whether Flanagan’s version can hold an audience where the last attempt couldn’t.