The Exorcist franchise is getting a radical reset. On Thursday, Warner Bros. and Blumhouse unveiled the first trailer for The Exorcist: Martyrs, a ground-up reboot that swaps the series' traditional possession iconography for a serial-killer procedural - and hands the franchise's future to Scarlett Johansson and director Mike Flanagan.
Set for a March 10, 2027 theatrical release, the film casts Johansson as Det. Julie Miller, a New York City police detective who, thirteen years before the story opens, closed out the reign of terror of a satanic murderer known as Father Sunday. That case turned her into a hero and, by the sound of the trailer's voiceover, hollowed her out in the process: she has buried herself in the job ever since. The peace doesn't hold. A new killer begins scrawling her name on the walls of a church crypt - written in an altar boy's blood - and pulls her back into the darkness she thought she had put in the ground along with Father Sunday.
A Franchise Rebuilt Around a Detective, Not a Demon
The trailer marks the clearest signal yet that this iteration of The Exorcist intends to abandon the possession-horror template that has defined the property since William Friedkin's 1973 original. There are no spinning heads in the footage; the emphasis falls instead on forensic detail, crime-scene photography, and Johansson's Miller narrating her own descent. It is a tonal pivot that positions the film closer to a faith-inflected serial-killer thriller than to a supernatural set piece - a genre lane Flanagan has spent his career occupying from the other direction, most notably in Midnight Mass and The Fall of the House of Usher.
Flanagan takes the directing chair here, his first pass at a property with this kind of built-in pop-culture gravity. He is also working with a cast that reads as unusually deep for a horror tentpole. John Leguizamo plays Father Sunday, the killer whose shadow still governs Miller's life - a role the trailer treats less as a living antagonist than as a wound that will not close. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Laurence Fishburne appear as Father William and Father Nichol, respectively, suggesting the film will engage the institutional church as both ally and obstacle. Diane Lane plays Mary Miller, with Jacobi Jupe as Max Miller, Sasha Calle as Det. Gina Restrepo, and Scoot McNairy as Clay Silver rounding out the ensemble.
Johansson's First Full Horror Lead
For Johansson, the role represents a notable left turn. The actor has spent the past decade split between Marvel-scale spectacle and awards-season drama, and Martyrs marks the first time she has anchored a horror film of this size on her own. The trailer leans hard on her presence, giving her long stretches of silence punctuated by procedural narration - a bet that her star image can carry a franchise reboot without the usual demonic furniture.
The title itself is a loaded one. Martyrs shares its name with Pascal Laugier's notorious 2008 French extremity film, a touchstone in the New French Extremity movement and a movie that has nothing to do with The Exorcist lineage. Whether the overlap is homage, coincidence, or a deliberate provocation, the studio has not clarified. What the trailer does establish is that this film intends to traffic in religious violence and bodily dread rather than jump-scare possession.
The March 2027 Slot
A March release places the film in a corridor that has recently rewarded horror with room to breathe - early spring has become a reliable launchpad for franchise entries that don't want to compete with the October crush. The studio is betting that a recognizable IP plus a marquee lead plus an auteur-adjacent director can convert a skeptical fanbase. That fanbase has reason to be wary: the previous attempt to continue The Exorcist lineage, 2023's The Exorcist: Believer, was widely rejected by critics and audiences alike, and the planned trilogy it was meant to launch was quietly abandoned.
That history hangs over Martyrs whether the marketing acknowledges it or not. The trailer's strategy appears to be distance: different title construction, different genre grammar, different lead. If it works, the franchise gets a second life built on detective fiction rather than demonology. If it doesn't, the property may finally run out of resurrections.
The Exorcist: Martyrs opens in theaters on March 10, 2027.
Source: Hollywood Reporter
