Universal Pictures and Blumhouse have released the full trailer for The Exorcist: Martyrs, putting Scarlett Johansson at the center of Mike Flanagan’s new attempt to restart the long-running horror franchise.
According to Blumhouse’s official synopsis, Johansson plays New York City detective Julie Miller. Thirteen years before the events of the film, Miller ended the terror reign of a satanic serial killer known as Father Sunday. The case made her a hero, but the new trailer shows that history resurfacing through another killing tied directly to her past.
The setup moves The Exorcist: Martyrs away from the most familiar possession-story template. Current studio materials center the film on a murder investigation, a church crypt, a death-row figure, and a demonic thread connecting a lineage of killers. The result looks less like a remake of the 1973 film and more like a supernatural serial-killer thriller built inside The Exorcist mythology.
Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Father William, a former prison chaplain who heard Father Sunday’s final confession. Sasha Calle plays rookie detective Gina Restrepo. Diane Lane plays Mary, Julie Miller’s mother, who helps care for Julie’s son Max, played by Jacobi Jupe. The cast also includes Scoot McNairy, Gil Bellows, Laurence Fishburne, and John Leguizamo, with Leguizamo playing Father Sunday.
A new direction after Believer
The trailer’s most significant detail is the creative reset. In 2024, Blumhouse and Morgan Creek announced Flanagan’s film as a new approach to The Exorcist, with TheWrap reporting at the time that it would tell an all-new story set in the franchise universe and would not be a sequel to The Exorcist: Believer.
Believer had been positioned as the start of a larger revival. TheWrap later reported that the 2023 film was tied to Universal’s reported $400 million Exorcist deal and that The Exorcist: Deceiver had been pulled from the schedule. Martyrs now gives Universal and Blumhouse a public relaunch point without asking audiences to follow the abandoned sequel path.
The early materials suggest a different pitch for the property: star-led, filmmaker-led, and structured around an investigation rather than a direct legacy sequel. That does not remove the pressure attached to the name. It changes the question. Instead of asking whether the new film can recreate the shock of the original, Martyrs appears to ask whether The Exorcist can support a different kind of horror story.
Mike Flanagan’s name is part of the sell
Universal and Blumhouse are leaning heavily on Flanagan’s genre résumé. Official materials connect him to The Haunting of Hill House, The Fall of the House of Usher, Midnight Mass, Doctor Sleep, The Life of Chuck, Hush, Gerald’s Game, and his upcoming Carrie series.
That framing gives Martyrs a different kind of marketing hook. The trailer is not being sold only on franchise recognition or nostalgia. It is also being sold on the promise of a writer-director with a long record of turning established horror and literary material into character-driven dread.
What is confirmed so far
Title:The Exorcist: Martyrs
Release date: Scheduled to open in theaters on March 12, 2027
Writer and director: Mike Flanagan
Lead cast: Scarlett Johansson, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Diane Lane, Jacobi Jupe, Sasha Calle, Scoot McNairy, Gil Bellows, Laurence Fishburne, and John Leguizamo
Producers: David Robinson, Jason Blum, and Mike Flanagan
Source material: Based on characters created by William Peter Blatty
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