David Gordon Green exorcizes himself from remaining Exorcist sequels

David Gordon Green is no longer a Believer in The Exorcist. The director who previously rebooted the Halloween franchise into a trio of divisive but financially successful movies has left the sequel to 2023’s Exorcist: Believer, entitled Exorcist: Deciever, and its sequel, presumably called Exorcist: Reciever. Per Variety, Universal has replaced the Exorcist follow-up, initially set for April 18, 2025, on the schedule with a Michael Jackson biopic from Antoine Fuqua, a project that’s sure to make everyone feel as comfortable as an Exorcist movie.

The power of David Gordon Green’s Halloween movies compelled Universal to allow him to helm a trilogy of new Exorcist movies. In 2021, before audiences had spewed pea soup all over Exorcist: Believer, Green told Collider, “The first one of our trilogy is written, and the second two are being outlined. So we’ve got a ways to go on that, but we know where we’re going. It’s a new journey [with] some familiar characters and some new ones as well.”

Unfortunately, we’ll never get to see what Green had in store for. We imagine it involved three possessed girls haunting poor Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn). However, this is not surprising given the overwhelmingly negative response to Believer. While Green’s Halloween trilogy brought in more than $500 million worldwide, there were diminishing returns. Halloween: Kills managed a pretty decent return, considering it was released simultaneously in theaters and on Peacock and isn’t very good. Its sequel, Halloween: Ends, with its emphasis on men named Corey, completed the trilogy on a sour note, which seemingly carried over to Believer. Nevertheless, Green has better things to do than exorcize the demons of lonely children, such as exorcising the demons of Gemstone children. He’s currently working on Righteous Gemstones season four and a Ben Stiller movie called Nutcrackers.