ok..so you watched the trailer. Maybe twice. A homicide detective standing in a church crypt, a priest who looks like he hasn’t slept since the last execution he sat through, a twelve-year-old kid who is clearly about to have the worst year of his life, and then that last stretch where the whole thing stops being a cop movie and turns into something way nastier. Somewhere near the end you thought the obvious thing: okay, when do I actually get to see this?
If you went googling, you probably ran into an absolute mess of outdated rumors and broken dates. One article says March 2026. Another says 2027. Some call it “Mike Flanagan’s Exorcist movie,” some call it an untitled reboot, and the newest ones call it The Exorcist: Martyrs, which sounds like a completely different film. Is it? Did it get delayed? Did it get delayed twice? And is the date you’re looking at even going to hold this time?
Here’s the short version. It’s one movie, it’s the same movie it’s always been, and the Exorcist: Martyrs release date is March 12, 2027 in US theaters. The longer version is worth your five minutes, though, because it explains why half the articles out there are out of date.
It starts with a franchise Universal paid roughly $400 million for and then watched stumble on its first try, runs through a director who had to finish a Stephen King series before he could even start shooting, and ends with a title that Universal only made official on October 6, 2026.
So let’s go through all of it: the date, why it moved, why the name changed, what the movie’s actually about, whether you need homework before you go, and what nobody has confirmed yet.
When Does The Exorcist: Martyrs Come Out?
March 12, 2027. It’s a Friday, and it’s a theatrical-only release, so there’s no streaming day-and-date option waiting for you. Universal announced this date in January 2026, and Variety broke the news on January 16. Blumhouse’s official account repeated it on October 9, 2026, the day the trailer dropped.
Outside the US, a couple of markets are listed a couple of days earlier. France and South Korea show March 10, 2027, which is pretty normal, since a lot of countries open films on Wednesdays.
Most other countries haven’t published dates yet, so if you’re outside the US, check your local cinema listings closer to the time rather than trusting a random calendar.
Wait, Wasn’t This Movie Coming in 2026? Why Did the Release Date Move?
Yes, it was, and this is the part that confuses everybody. When Mike Flanagan was announced for the film in May 2024, Universal gave it a spot on March 13, 2026. That’s a full year before the date it has now. So what happened?
The simplest answer is that Flanagan was busy. He signed up to make a Stephen King adaptation, Carrie, for Prime Video, and that series was going to keep him occupied well into 2025. In June 2025 a fan asked him on Tumblr about the status of the Exorcist movie, and he told them production hadn’t started and that there was “no way it’s coming out next March.” He added that there was nothing to worry about.
Later that same day, Universal pulled the film off its 2026 calendar and slid an untitled Blumhouse movie into the slot instead, as The Hollywood Reporter reported.
Do the math and it’s hard to argue with. A horror movie of this size needs a cast, a shoot, and a few months of post-production. If you haven’t started filming by the middle of 2025, there’s simply no road to a March 2026 opening. Pushing it was the honest move, and honestly it was the better one for the movie too.
It’s worth saying what’s confirmed and what’s not. Flanagan himself pointed to Carrie, and the timing lines up. Universal never gave its own detailed explanation.
Then the pieces started falling into place fast:
November 2025: Johansson joins as the lead.
December 2025: Jacobi Jupe joins.
January 2026: Universal re-dates the film for March 12, 2027, and Diane Lane joins.
February 2026: Chiwetel Ejiofor and Laurence Fishburne join.
March 2026: Sasha Calle and John Leguizamo join, along with a group of Flanagan’s regular collaborators. Cameras were rolling in New York City by March 13.
June 2026: Filming wraps.
So the one-year delay wasn’t a studio panic move. It was the time it took to build the movie from nothing.
Why Did Universal Pick March 12 Specifically?
Universal hasn’t explained this, so anything beyond the basics is us reading the calendar. Our read: mid-March lands in spring break season, when a lot of teenagers and young adults have free time, and that’s the core horror audience.
There’s also a simple practical angle: the film was originally dated for the same time of year, so keeping March kept it in the window it was built around.
Is the March 12 Date Going to Hold This Time?
Nobody can promise that. Release dates move, and this one has already moved once. Those early production headaches have finally been resolved, giving the studio a clean slate.
That original schedule change was inevitable, considering they didn’t actually have a script or a working project. Now it does. It finished shooting in early June 2026, and it’s been in post-production since the summer.
Universal and Blumhouse have already started the real marketing push, with the title reveal on October 6 and a trailer launch at Blumfest and New York Comic Con on October 9. Studios don’t light that fuse five months out on a date they’re planning to move.
What could still shift it? A big competitor deciding to move onto the same weekend, or something going sideways in visual effects or sound work. Neither looks likely right now, but we’ll keep this page updated if anything changes.
Why Is It Called The Exorcist: Martyrs Now?
For most of the project’s life it was simply “Mike Flanagan’s The Exorcist,” and trade outlets mostly called it untitled. The name Martyrs had been floating around as a rumor since at least January 2026. Universal made it official on October 6, 2026.
It isn’t random. Esquire’s first look describes a serial killer who stages his murder scenes to resemble the martyrdoms of Catholic saints, so the title points straight at the story. It also does a second job: it tells you this isn’t a remake of the 1973 movie, and it isn’t a follow-up to Believer. It’s its own story under the Exorcist banner.
If you’ve been searching for “Mike Flanagan’s Exorcist movie” or “the new Exorcist,” you’ve been searching for this film.
Is It a Sequel to The Exorcist: Believer? Do I Need to Watch Anything First?
No, it’s not a sequel to Believer. Universal has been clear on that from the start, and it’s the one detail that never changed through the whole delay.
A bit of background helps explain why. Universal and Peacock bought the rights to the franchise in 2021 for about $400 million, with a plan for a new trilogy. Believer came out in October 2023 as the first chapter, and it made around $136 million worldwide, which wasn’t what the studio wanted from a $400 million bet.
The planned follow-up, The Exorcist: Deceiver, was dated for April 2025, but the director left in January 2024 and the whole trilogy was scrapped when Flanagan’s project was announced that May.
So this film starts fresh. Flanagan told IGN it was designed to stand on its own for people who haven’t seen the earlier films, with a thread for longtime fans to pick up. Variety describes it as set in the same universe as the 1973 film.
Short answer: you can walk in cold.
What Is The Exorcist: Martyrs About?
Here’s the setup, from the official synopsis as outlets have reported it. Thirteen years ago, NYPD detective Julie Miller (Scarlett Johansson) put an end to a satanic serial killer known as Father Sunday. The case made her a hero, and she’s been throwing herself into work ever since.
Now a new killer has written her name in an altar boy’s blood on the wall of a church crypt, and she’s dragged straight back into the thing she thought she’d buried.
Meanwhile, her twelve-year-old son Max becomes the target of a demonic force. That’s the possession side of the story, and it’s the part that makes it an Exorcist movie. Notice what’s different, though: the possession isn’t a locked-bedroom story this time. It’s tied into a murder investigation.
The longer synopsis adds that Julie works with a former prison chaplain, Father William, who heard Father Sunday’s final confession, and a sharp rookie detective named Gina Restrepo. Together they start to find a thread running through a line of famous killers, and it leads to something that isn’t human.
Who’s in the cast?
Scarlett Johansson as Detective Julie Miller
John Leguizamo as Father Sunday, the killer
Chiwetel Ejiofor as Father William, the prison chaplain
Sasha Calle as rookie detective Gina Restrepo
Jacobi Jupe as Max, Julie’s son
Diane Lane as Mary, Julie’s mother, who’s moved in to help raise Max
Laurence Fishburne as Father Nichol, a respected priest
Scoot McNairy as Clay Silver, a paroled convict
Gil Bellows plays Peter Nicks, an ex-disciple pulled from Father Sunday’s inner circle.
A group of Flanagan’s regulars is also in the film, including Carla Gugino, Kate Siegel, Samantha Sloyan, Rahul Kohli, Hamish Linklater, Carl Lumbly and John Gallagher Jr. Their roles haven’t been revealed.
Who Is Mike Flanagan, and Why Did Universal Hand Him The Exorcist?
If you only know Flanagan from one Netflix show or one Stephen King movie, here’s the quick tour of how he ended up here. And once you see the pattern, he starts to look like a pretty natural pick for an Exorcist movie.
He studied film at Towson University, moved to Los Angeles in 2003, and spent his early years editing sketch comedy, reality TV, documentaries and commercials. Nothing glamorous. His real start came with Absentia (2011), a small supernatural horror movie funded through Kickstarter, and that’s what got people paying attention. After that, it goes fast:
2013: Oculus, the start of his run with Blumhouse.
2016: Dominated the horror space with a back-to-back slate of Hush, Before I Wake, and Ouija: Origin of Evil.
2017: Gerald’s Game, his first Stephen King adaptation, for Netflix.
2018: The Haunting of Hill House, the Netflix series that arguably took him from horror-fan favorite to a name regular streaming viewers knew.
2019: Doctor Sleep, the sequel to The Shining, based on King’s follow-up novel.
2020 to 2023: The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, The Midnight Club and The Fall of the House of Usher, all for Netflix.
2024: The Life of Chuck, another King adaptation, which won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival.
2026: Carrie on Prime Video, with all eight episodes landing on October 7, 2026, just two days before the Martyrs trailer came out.
So why him? Part of it is simple: he wanted it. Flanagan told The Hollywood Reporter in 2024 that he chased the job “very aggressively,” and in the studio’s announcement he called the original film one of the reasons he became a filmmaker.
The rest is our read, not a studio statement. After Believer didn’t land, Universal needed someone who could take a famous, beloved horror title and make it feel fresh instead of like a rerun.
Flanagan already did a version of that with Doctor Sleep. Faith, grief and family run through almost everything he makes, and those are exactly the things an Exorcist story is built on. And this is his fourth movie with Blumhouse, so the relationship was already there.
What Does the Exorcist: Martyrs Trailer Show?
The first full trailer came out on October 9, 2026, and the first thing it tells you is that this isn’t a movie about a kid tied to a bed. It plays like a crime thriller. Julie Miller (Scarlett Johansson) is a detective who thought she’d closed the book on a killer called Father Sunday thirteen years ago, and now somebody new is leaving her name in blood on a church crypt wall.
If you walked in expecting levitating beds and pea soup, did you get a surprise or what? Outlets covering it said the same thing: it looks a lot more like a serial killer movie than a typical possession story.
The second thing is who’s working the case with her. Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Father William, a former prison chaplain who heard Father Sunday’s last confession, and Sasha Calle’s rookie detective Gina Restrepo are the other two points of the triangle.
The official synopsis says the three of them find a thread running through a whole line of real-life killers, from H.H. Holmes to the Zodiac, and that’s the hook the trailer leans on. So is the evil here a person, a demon, or something that’s been passed down from one killer to the next? That’s the question the footage is built to make you ask.
Third, Flanagan was clear about what this isn’t. He told Esquire the first job is making sure people know they aren’t getting a “retread” of the original, and that it’s a story inside the Exorcist universe that hasn’t been told before.
That matches the trailer. There’s no attempt to copy the 1973 film’s look or feel, and the pitch is clearly “different kind of story,” not “same story again.”
Finally, the trailer sent fans digging, and they came up with two details that feed the Exorcist III theory: a framed photo that looks like George C. Scott, who played Lieutenant Kinderman in that 1990 film, is on a shelf in Johansson’s character’s home, and a nametag on her that reads “Kinderman” in a couple of shots.
Flanagan hasn’t commented on it, so it’s still a theory, and we break it down in the next section. The trailer rollout also repeated the same March 12, 2027 release date Universal set back in January.
Is This Secretly Connected to The Exorcist III?
This is the question the trailer started, and it’s fair to be curious. The setup, a detective chasing murders that look like the work of a killer who’s already dead, is very close to The Exorcist III (1990), the one where original creator William Peter Blatty actually stepped in to write and direct, adapting his own novel, Legion.
Flanagan has said that film was an influence, and at New York Comic Con he called it one of the franchise’s most underrated, underappreciated films.
Fans spotted a few details in the trailer that feed the theory. A framed photo that looks like it could be George C. Scott’s character from Exorcist III, a nametag that appears to read “Kinderman,” and the fact that Johansson’s character is named Julie, the same name as Kinderman’s daughter in that film.
In that film, the murders trace back to the Gemini Killer, who was supposedly already dead, which is the same kind of setup.
Here’s where we land: it’s a theory. A well-supported one, and Flanagan has hinted that longtime fans will find extra bits, but nobody officially has confirmed that Julie is Kinderman’s daughter. We’ll know a lot more once the movie is out, and we’ll cover it properly then.
What’s Going to Feel Different About This Exorcist Movie?
A few things are already clear. First, the tone. Flanagan has called this the scariest movie he’s ever made, and he’s told Entertainment Weekly he wants it to feel like a world where God is dead, with no sense that help is coming. That is a huge pivot away from the deeply emotional, character-driven vibes of Hill House or The Life of Chuck.
Second, the shape. He told Esquire the idea was to combine what he loves about movies like Se7en and The Silence of the Lambs with what he loves about The Exorcist.
Third, and this one’s for the old-school fans: there’s no “Tubular Bells.” That’s the piano piece everybody connects to the 1973 film. When IGN asked, Flanagan answered with a flat “no,” and he told ComicBook he was adamant about leaving it out so the movie wouldn’t give up its own identity.
What Else Is Opening Around March 12?
If you’re planning a theater trip, here’s what the calendars show right now. Keep in mind studios shuffle dates all the time, so this is a snapshot, not a promise.
March 5: Pixar’s Gatto and The Thomas Crown Affair
March 12: The Exorcist: Martyrs
March 19: Sonic the Hedgehog 4, The Nightingale and Wolf Creek: Legacy
March 26: Godzilla x Kong: Supernova
The good news for the film is that, on current schedules, it has its opening weekend to itself. Its closest genre neighbor is Wolf Creek: Legacy a week later, and the bigger family and monster titles around it are chasing a different audience.
What Don’t We Know Yet?
There are still some open questions, and it’s better to be upfront about them:
MPA rating: Not announced. Given the tone Flanagan’s describing, an R is the safe guess, but it’s only a guess.
Runtime: Not announced.
Premiere and first reactions: Nothing scheduled that we’ve seen.
International dates: Only a few markets are listed.
The Exorcist III connection: Still a theory.
The Exorcist: Martyrs Timeline: How We Got Here
July 2021: Universal and Peacock buy the franchise rights for about $400 million.
October 6, 2023: The Exorcist: Believer opens.
January 2024: The director of the planned sequel steps away.
May 29, 2024: Mike Flanagan is announced, the earlier trilogy plan is dropped, and the film is dated for March 13, 2026.
June 2025: Flanagan says there’s no way it makes that date; Universal removes it from the calendar.
November 2025 to March 2026: The cast comes together.
January 2026: Universal re-dates the film for March 12, 2027.
March 13 to early June 2026: Principal photography in New York City.
October 6, 2026: Universal reveals the title, The Exorcist: Martyrs.
October 9, 2026: First trailer debuts.
March 12, 2027: Theatrical release.
Wrap Up: Should You Mark March 12?
Yes, and this time you can do it with a bit more confidence than you could a year ago. The reasons for the first delay were real, they were about building the movie, and they’re done. The film’s finished shooting, the marketing has started, and the studio is repeating the date out loud.
What we can’t tell you yet is whether it’s good. We know the cast is strong, the director is one of the best horror storytellers working, and the trailer pulls off the hard trick of making a franchise that’s lost its way look dangerous again.
But a trailer is a trailer. We’ll keep updating this page with the rating, runtime and first reactions as they come in, so check back as March gets closer.
If you’re interested, you can check out our Werwulf release date here!
TL;DR: The Exorcist: Martyrs Release Date at a Glance!
- Release date: March 12, 2027 (US theaters, Universal Pictures)
- Format: Theatrical release
- Title: The Exorcist: Martyrs (made official October 6, 2026; it was an untitled Flanagan film before that)
- Director and writer: Mike Flanagan
- Lead: Scarlett Johansson as NYPD detective Julie Miller
- Status: Finished shooting in June 2026, in post-production, first trailer out October 9, 2026
- Not announced yet: MPA rating, runtime
- Earlier dates it held: March 13, 2026 (pulled in June 2025)
FAQs: Quick Answers
What is the Exorcist: Martyrs release date?
March 12, 2027, in US theaters.
Who is directing The Exorcist: Martyrs?
Mike Flanagan, who also wrote the film. He’s the filmmaker behind The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass, Doctor Sleep and The Life of Chuck.
Is it the same movie as Mike Flanagan’s untitled Exorcist film?
Yes. The Exorcist: Martyrs is the official title for that project.
Was the release date delayed?
Yes, once. It was dated March 13, 2026, then pulled in June 2025 and moved to March 12, 2027.
Is it a sequel to The Exorcist: Believer?
No. It’s a standalone story.
About the Author.
Hi, I’m Vansh, the founder of Vibe On Cue. I track the absolute best ways to experience cinema, from the biggest Hollywood Blockbusters and upcoming release dates to the finest details of PVOD & Streaming and pristine Blu-ray & 4K physical media. And when the credits roll, I break down the narrative with deep-dive Ending explained guides. If you live for the full life cycle of film, stick around and explore the site!
