♥♥♥
+ Most Deserved Flop of the Year
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| A somewhat bland poster for Renny Harlin's Exorcist: The Beginning |
Father Merrin is a priest who has fallen from his faith, as he gets hired to work as an archaeologist at a buried church in Africa, which shouldn't exist. SPOILER - It turns out the be a church of Lucifer!
Exorcist: The Beginning, written by Alexi Hawley (The Following (2014-15)), with Caleb Carr (Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist (2005)) and William Wisher Jr. (Judge Dredd (1995)) contributing story elements, and directed by Renny Harlin (Cliffhanger (1993)), is a tolerably decent prequel to William Friedkin's original masterpiece The Exorcist (1973).
Stellan Skarsgård (Beowuld & Grendel (2005)) is ideally cast as a younger version of Merrin, so memorably played by Max Von Sydow in the original. Exorcist: The Beginning is a totally different type of film, and its best moments are primarily in the devious, subterranean church. It is marred by an ugly CGI-rendered hyena attack and general overuse of closeups.
Exorcist: The Beginning is an unobtrusive and forgettable horror.
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Cost: 50 mil. $
Box office: 78 mil. $
= Big flop
[Exorcist: The Beginning premiered 18 August (Hollywood) and runs 114 minutes. The film came to be as a reaction to Paul Shrader's Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist (2005), the original prequel film, which Shrader had made too talky, slow and un-gory for the studios' (Morgan Creek Productions and distributor Warner Bros.) liking, and so he was fired, and a new prequel was produced: Skarsgård stars in both films, but Harlin is reportedly responsible for most of what is seen in Exorcist: The Beginning. Shooting took place from November 2003 - February 2004 in Casablanca, Morocco and Italy, including in Rome's Cinecittà Studios. The film isn't consistent with the facts stated in Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) about the African setting and possessed boy there. It opened #1 with 18 mil. $ in North America, where it fell to #5 in its second week before leaving the top 5 and grossed 41.8 mil. $ (53.6 % of the total gross). The 2nd and 3rd biggest markets were Italy with 7.5 mil. $ (9.6 %) and Spain with 5.2 mil. $ (6.7 %). Shrader was subsequently allowed to release his 30 mil. $ movie, which grossed an even worse, catastrophic 251k $ domestically. Sometimes the Exorcist: The Beginning cost is erroneously listed as 80 mil. $, the combined budget of the two films. Friedkin has called Exorcist: The Beginning his "most humiliating professional experience." Exorcist: The Beginning is rotten at 11 % with a 3.5 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
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