We love Ellen Burstyn; her performance as terrified mother Chris MacNeil in 1973’s The Exorcist is just one of many reasons why. But even the power of Burstyn couldn’t save 2023’s The Exorcist: Believer, a franchise entry that is now most memorable for the way it wasted one of horror’s most longed-for onscreen reunions, bringing Burstyn’s Chris and Linda Blair’s Regan back together.
Horror fans waited 50 years for that, through other Exorcist sequels that are both amazing and terrible, and the movie was such a disappointment that Believer director David Gordon Green’s planned follow-up was taken off the table. But Hollywood can’t let The Exorcist go, which is why Mike Flanagan’s The Exorcist: Martyrs will be hitting theaters in 2027.
Burstyn, however, is over it. Speaking to Variety, she sounded ready to never talk about the franchise ever again.
“Isn’t there enough already of the Exorcist thing? It’s enough already,” the 93-year-old Oscar-winner said.
Burstyn fans will recall there was one big reason she signed on for Believer, and it didn’t have anything to do with her feelings toward the horror series. In 2022, the Hollywood Reporter asked why she’d agreed to be in Green’s film after so long.
“I’ve turned down many versions of The Exorcist 2. I’ve said no every time. This time they offered me a whole bunch of money and I still said no. And then they surprised me, and they came back and said, ‘We doubled the offer.’ … I thought, ‘That’s a lot of money. Let me think about it,'” she said.
Though she said she felt like “the devil is asking my price,” she came up with a solution.
“The next thought that came to mind was, ‘My price is a scholarship program for talented students at our master’s degree program at Pace University. That’s my price.’ So I then went back and upped their up and ended up getting what I want. And I’ve got a scholarship program for young actors.”
That’s a worthy use of what sounds like a hefty paycheck cranked out by the Hollywood machine. If only the movie itself had been more deserving of her participation.
The Exorcist: Martyrs, which does not star Burstyn, hits theaters March 12, 2027.
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