Barbenheimer was good for some serious box office cash and seeing the two movies go head-to-head was enough that some people have tried to make this weekend’s Saw Patrol (aka Saw X and Paw Patrol) a thing, but ExorSwift will not be happening. That’s because following the surprise announcement that a Taylor Swift concert movie was set to hit theaters the same day as The Exorcist: Believer, Blumhouse moved its movie, and studio head Jason Blum isn’t even pretending he did for any other reason.
Speaking with EW, Jason Blum freely admits that when facing the choice of joining Taylor Swift on opening weekend or letting her have it, he gave in. While Blum himself at first promoted the whole ExorSwift idea, he says it was simply too big a risk. And since Taylor’s movie and Exorcist will still be sharing theaters when the horror film does debut, anybody who really wanted to make that double feature happen still can. He explained…
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.
Generally speaking, we simply don’t see more than one major film release on the same weekend anymore. Studios all consider competition a difficult thing to deal with and so studios end up staking out release dates years in advance if only to be sure that they can grab a date nobody else has. On the rare occasion that we see two movies hitting on the same date, the one that sees itself as the smaller film usually moves on.
And that’s what happened here. Taylor Swift is the biggest star in the world and there was never any doubt that The Eras Tour film was going to do big business. But The Exorcist: Believer likely appeals to a different audience, so like Barbie and Oppenheimer before it, it might succeed in its own right on the same weekend. If that didn’t work out it would likely mean millions in lost box office for Exorcist. Blumhouse is no stranger to scary prospects but Jason Blum says that competing with Taylor Swift is about as scary as it gets for him, he admits…
The one thing that scares me to death is Taylor Swift!
From a business standpoint, you simply can’t take Taylor for granted. She’s just too powerful. As an actress Taylor Swift is only just getting started but that doesn’t mean she can’t take over movie theaters with her music. This is already poised to be one of the biggest concert films ever released and any demon would be smart to be scared of that.