What about those dueling Exorcist prequels?
Here’s an example of wild, nonsensical Hollywood decision-making at its finest: 2004 saw the release of Renny Harlin’s Exorcist: The Beginning—then in 2005, we got Paul Schrader’s Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist. Schrader made his film first; studio execs deemed it not scary enough and brought in Harlin to create a new version. When The Beginning bombed, Dominion got a theatrical release and also bombed, though Schrader’s film got marginally better reviews. In both, Stellan Skarsgård plays a younger version of Father Merrin, the “old priest” in 1973’s The Exorcist, battling evils both ancient (demons) and recent (Nazis) in the 1940s-set tales.
