THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER Producer Jason Blum Says Taylor Swift "Scares Me to Death"

The Exorcist: Believer was originally supposed to be released on Friday, October 13th, but when it was announced that Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Movie was set to come out on the same day, Blumhouse moved the release date up a week to October 6th because they didn’t want to go up against that monstrous movie, which is going to be a massive hit.

Producer Jason Blum recently talked about the release date shuffle with EW and he said, “The one thing that scares me to death is Taylor Swift!” He went on to explain: “We had this amazing Friday the 13th in October, which is the single best day to release a scary movie.”

He originally paid homage by writing the tag #Exorswift” on Twitter when the Eras announcement came out. He went on to write: “Look what you made me do,” quoting a Swift song.

“Obviously, we moved off that [date] and we bowed our head to Taylor Swift. It was too risky to see if ‘Exorswift’ was going to take or not. People will still have the Exorswift opportunity, so maybe we got to have our cake and eat it, too.”

I’m curious to see how The Exorcist: Believer does at the box office. I sure do enjoy watching horror movies, so I’ll show up to watch it. But, there hasn’t been as much hype for it as I thought there would be. I haven’t seen a lot of people expressing interest in watching it, but we’ll see.

Either way, the Taylor Swift concert film is going to make a lot more money than The Exorcist: Believer. Here’s the synopsis for the film:

Since the death of his pregnant wife in a Haitian earthquake 12 years ago, Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom, Jr.; One Night in Miami, Hamilton) has raised their daughter, Angela (Lidya Jewett, Good Girls) on his own. 

But when Angela and her friend Katherine (Olivia Marcum), disappear in the woods, only to return three days later with no memory of what happened to them, it unleashes a chain of events that will force Victor to confront the nadir of evil and, in his terror and desperation, seek out the only person alive who has witnessed anything like it before: Chris MacNeil.

This film is the first of a trilogy coming from Blumhouse and Halloween director David Gordon Green. The franchise also sees the return of Ellen Burstyn as Chris MacNeil, ”an actress who has been forever altered by what happened to her daughter Regan five decades before.”

The film also stars Ann Dowd (The Handmaid’s Tale, Hereditary) as Victor and Angela’s neighbor, and Jennifer Nettles (Harriet, The Righteous Gemstones) and Norbert Leo Butz (Fosse/Verdon, Bloodline) as the parents of Katherine, Angela’s friend.

David Gordon Green wrote the screenplay with Peter Sattler (Camp X-Ray). The story comes from Scott Teems (Halloween Kills), Danny McBride (Halloween Trilogy) and Green, based on characters created by William Peter Blatty.

The movie is set to be released in theaters on Friday, October 6th.