The Exorcist TV show creator fears Disney/Fox deal could end the series

Last Updated on July 21, 2021

Disney's 52 billion dollar acquisition of Fox was huge news last week, and a lot of the coverage centered on the doors this merger could open for Marvel Studios: the company would now have access to the X-MEN and FANTASTIC FOUR characters and could start bringing them into the official Marvel Cinematic Universe. That's exciting for Marvel fans… but there are other properties that could suffer as a result of Disney buying Fox.

Jeremy Slater, creator of The Exorcist television series, fears his show may not fare well now that it's owned by Disney. In a tweet, Slater said,

This Fox/Disney merger is awful for a number of reasons, and I can’t imagine it means good things for the future of our show."

He reiterated this worry during an interview with Entertainment Weekly after The Exorcist's season two finale aired, and went into the possibility of taking the show to a different network or streaming service if things fall apart for it on Fox:

I think this Fox-Disney deal… it doesn’t mean great things for 20th Century Fox as a studio and Fox as a network, but you also never know. Now, we’re not necessarily on brand for Disney, but they’re also going to need a lot of content to fill their streaming platforms and networks, so I don’t know. I think there’s a lot of options.

We definitely have passionate fans at the network and at the studio — we just don’t have the audience — and so I don’t know whether the option is to roll the dice and just keep producing the show because it’s something they believe in, or maybe taking our very loyal fan base that would probably follow us anywhere we go. I think that would be hopefully an attractive prospect if you’re a streaming service or something like that that wants to be competitive in the horror genre. I feel that we’ve made the best horror show on TV for two years running and the fans that have discovered us will follow us. I remain optimistic."

I still haven't watched a single episode of The Exorcist, so I can't really weigh in on it, but I do know that Slater has ideas on how the stories of its characters will continue on in a third season, so I hope he will get a chance to tell those stories.

Slater told EW, 

Mouse and Tomas went off on their own to take the battle to the Vatican by using Tomas’ sensitivity powers to sniff out the corruption in the Vatican, and months later Marcus got a message from God telling him Tomas is in trouble, so something bad has happened along the way, and you don’t know whether that’s Bennett or something else, and that’s going to be the big driving question going into the season. What happened to Mouse and Tomas?

I also think, if we’re lucky enough to get a season 3, this year we talked about how we wanted to bring in elements from other cultures and other faiths and start exploring other ways that other religions out there may be fighting the same battle. They may have other methodologies and other names for evil, but they’re all kind of fighting the same thing."

One of these days I'm going to get caught up on this show.