This week, a new Russell Crowe movie is released. The film concerns a demon that comes to inhabit a person, and the struggles of a priest to cast the demon out. You might have seen its poster, in which Russell Crowe wears a dog collar and clutches a crucifix.
If that sounds familiar, it might be because it has only been a matter of months since the last time that Russell Crowe starred in a film about a demon that comes to inhabit a person, and the struggles of a priest to cast the demon out, that had a poster in which Russell Crowe wears a dog collar and clutches a crucifix. That film was The Pope’s Exorcist. This new one is called The Exorcism. Do keep up.
If you think it’s slightly inexplicable, to the point of outright derangement, for Russell Crowe to make two films about the same thing, with more or less the same title, where he pretty much wears the same costume, and the poster for each of them uses the same font, then you might have a point. This sort of thing just hasn’t happened in recent memory.
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Even Nicolas Cage, in the midst of his prolific “Look, I’ll make any film you give me” stage, didn’t make two films as identical as The Exorcism and The Pope’s Exorcist. Even when he made two different films about two different men who can both see slightly into the future and use their skill to stop two different ends of the world (Next and Knowing), he had the good sense to give a couple of years between the two.
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So, had it not been for Covid, there could have been four whole years between Russell Crowe’s two exorcist films. Had that been the case, barely anyone would have noticed. And maybe, just maybe, Crowe is slightly a victim of his own success here. This is just a punt, but you get the feeling that The Exorcism has gone out of its way to ape the publicity material of The Pope’s Exorcist because it wants to ride the latter’s coat-tails a little. Maybe this is all just an unlucky coincidence.
Either way, what’s done is done. Whatever the circumstances that led to this event, it looks to all the world as if Russell Crowe wants to pump out a relentless stream of identical exorcism movies until the end of time. So now it’s time for him to strike while the iron is hot. By my calculations, he has just 14 months to film and release the concluding part of what has the potential to be one of the weirdest unofficial trilogies of all time. Exorcists in Space, anyone?
When I first heard of The Exorcism starting Russell Crowe, my first thought was “oh, is the sequel to The Pope’s Exorcist out already?”, which I assume is what the marketing team for The Exorcism were banking on.
On the subject of Pope’s Exorcist sequels - they do need to get a move on given that they apparently need to make 199 of them…