What happened to truthful movie titles? It appears the title of last year's The Last Exorcism was guilty of fibbing as a sequel to the surprise hit is now in the works, with a writer already in place.
Heat Vision Blog has the exclusive on the news that screenwriter Damien Chazelle has been tapped to write the script for a Last Exorcism sequel, taking over from writers of the first film Andrew Gurland and Huck Botko. One can only wonder what imaginative title they will come up with this time around - Somehow I don't think "No Really, This Is The Last Exorcism" would look good on the poster...
Issues with the name aside it's not entirely surprising they're doing another one since the first made over $67 million on a budget of under $2 million. That's some amazing profitability right there and if they can keep the budget as low this time around (although sequels to horrors often get a budget boost and ironically don't end up as good as the first) then another success is all but guaranteed, right?
As well as writing and directing his first feature Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, Chazelle has written two scripts which are both in-development: the first is Grand Piano, described as "a Hitchcockian thriller about a classical pianist," which he sold to Buried producer Adrian Guerra and which has Agnosia director Eugenio Mira attached to direct. The second is The Claim, which was on the 2010 Black List and is about "a single father in search of his kidnapped daughter; he must contend with a couple who claims the child is their daughter."
A sequel makes sense financially but there isn't really a need for one. The first one, although not great, was at least an interesting take on the found-footage trend of movies and turned out to be more of a psychological drama than an all-out horror as it was marketed to be. The story seemed pretty self-contained so I don't know where they can go from there other than to just repeat themselves.
Are we looking at another Paranormal Activity style franchise here?