The Pope’s Exorcist may be chapter one in a trilogy

It’s been almost exactly one year since Columbia Pictures / Screen Gems brought The Pope’s Exorcist (read our review HERE), a supernatural thriller starring Russell Crowe, to theatres. Just two weeks after the film was released, our friends at Bloody Disgusting heard that a sequel was in development… but everything has been quiet since then. During a recent interview with The Six O’Clock Show, Crowe confirmed that a sequel is in development – and that The Pope’s Exorcist was actually meant to be chapter one in a trilogy!

As it turns out, things have been quiet on the Pope’s Exorcist front because there was a behind-the-scenes shake-up with the studio executives, but it sounds like Crowe still has hopes that the trilogy is going to happen. He told The Six O’Clock Show (with thanks to MovieWeb for the transcription), “(A sequel) is in discussion at the moment. The producers originally got the kick off from the studio not just for one sequel but for two. But there’s been a change of studio heads at the moment, so that’s going around in a few circles. But very definitely, man. We set that character up that you could take him out and put him into a lot of different circumstances. And remember, the man that’s based on, Gabriele Amorth, he wrote 12 books. So we have more than enough source material to do one or two more of those films.“

A while back, The Exorcist director William Friedkin made a documentary about Father Gabriele Amorth (and you can read our review of The Devil and Father Amorth at THIS LINK), a real-life exorcist who passed away in 2016 at the age of 91. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Screen Gems acquired the rights to tell the story of the exorcist’s life from Michael Patrick Kaczmarek and faith-based media company Loyola Productions. That deal included rights to Amorth’s two international bestselling memoirs An Exorcist Tells His Story and An Exorcist: More Stories, as well as other “detailed accounts of his exploits of pulling the devil out of people all over the world.”

For The Pope’s Exorcist, Crowe took on the role of real-life figure Father Gabriele Amorth, a priest who acted as chief exorcist of the Vatican and who performed more than 100,000 exorcisms in his lifetime. Amorth wrote two memoirs and detailed his experiences battling Satan and demons that had clutched people in their evil.

Overlord‘s Julius Avery directed The Pope’s Exorcist from a screenplay by Evan Spiliotopoulos, with revisions by Chuck MacLean. The script was based on original drafts by Chester Hastings & R. Dean McCreary, which received revisions from Michael Petroni.

Crowe was joined in the cast by Alex Essoe (Starry Eyes), Daniel Zovatto (It Follows), Laurel Marsden (Ms. Marvel), Cornell S. John (Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald), and newcomer Peter DeSouza-Feighoney, with Franco Nero, star of the original Django, as the Pope. Ralph Ineson (The Witch) provided the voice of a demon.

Scott Strauss, Michael Bitar, and Giselle Johnson oversaw the project for Screen Gems. The film was produced by Michael Patrick Kaczmarek through his company Jesus & Mary, Loyola president Eddie Siebert, Doug Belgrad of 2.0 Entertainment, and Jeff Katz of Worldwide Katz.

Are you a fan of The Pope’s Exorcist, and would you like to see the story of Father Gabriele Amorth continue across a trilogy? Let us know by leaving a comment below.