Sony buys life rights to Vatican exorcist in hopes of launching new movie franchise

Catholicism is hotter than ever thanks to the Met Gala, and now Sony Screen Gems is looking to cash in on all of this religious fervor buy buying the life rights to Father Gabriele Amorth, an Italian priest who performed “tens of thousands of exorcisms” for the Vatican and died in 2016. That comes from Deadline, which notes that Sony also got the rights to Amorth’s two best-selling memoirs, An Exorcist Tells His Story and An Exorcist: More Stories (which is not a very good title). These acquisitions will put Screen Gems in a position to create a “genre franchise” based on Amorth’s anti-demon adventures, which will presumably be like a more church-oriented take on the Conjuring movies.

The Deadline story doesn’t say when we might see the first Father Amorth movie (or if the plan is really to make a series of movies about a demon-fighting priest), but those Conjuring movies do make a lot of money so it’ll probably want to get this moving pretty fast.