‘The Exorcist: Martyrs’ Plot Leak Points to a Time Jump

Daniel Richtman, the Patreon-based scooper who deals in casting notices and character breakdowns, has posted what he says are character details for The Exorcist: Martyrs. Cosmic Book News ran them on Friday. No trade has matched the report, Universal has said nothing, and the description does not line up with the only synopsis the production itself has published. Treat every word of it as rumor.

Per the leak, Scarlett Johansson plays a single mother and police detective who, thirteen years after putting away a satanic serial killer, catches a new run of murders that rhymes with the old case. John Leguizamo is said to play that killer, a figure called Father Sunday. Chiwetel Ejiofor is described as a priest attached to the investigation and Laurence Fishburne as the one who ends up performing the exorcism, with Diane Lane as Johansson’s mother and Jacobi Jupe as her twelve-year-old son, Max, who is the one taken.

Two Loglines, Thirteen Years Apart

Here is the part worth sitting with. The only synopsis traceable to the production describes someone else entirely. Flanagan’s own company, Red Room Pictures, lists the film on its site as “a small-town rookie detective takes on a case involving inconceivable darkness.” World of Reel reported that same rookie framing in December 2025, sourced to material circulating internally at Blumhouse.

A rookie and a thirteen-year veteran are not the same character. They can, however, be the same movie. A prologue built around a young detective and the case that made her, followed by a jump to the present and the child she has had since, would reconcile both descriptions without either being wrong — and that shape is very Flanagan, who built The Haunting of Hill House and Doctor Sleep out of exactly this kind of long shadow. That is speculation. So is the leak. But it is the reading where the numbers add up.

What Is Actually Confirmed

The cast, the crew and the date are solid. Mike Flanagan writes and directs for Blumhouse, Atomic Monster, Morgan Creek and Red Room, with Jason Blum producing and Michael Fimognari shooting. Production ran in New York City from March 13 to June 9 of this year. Universal has it dated for March 12, 2027.

The ensemble is enormous and stacked with Flanagan regulars — Carla Gugino, Kate Siegel, Rahul Kohli, Samantha Sloyan, Hamish Linklater, Robert Longstreet, Carl Lumbly and John Gallagher Jr. — alongside Sasha Calle, Gil Bellows and Benjamin Pajak. Leguizamo’s casting was reported by The Hollywood Reporter in March, and JoBlo flagged at the time that he appeared to be playing an antagonist. That is the one strand of the leak with something already underneath it. A human villain is not a thing you hear about often on an exorcism picture.

Why ‘Martyrs’ Is a Loaded Word

The subtitle arrived quietly, spotted on a production listing and then on Red Room’s own site rather than announced, and it carries a history the campaign has not touched. Martyrs is also Pascal Laugier’s 2008 film, the hardest thing New French Extremity ever produced and a movie built entirely on the idea that suffering is a doorway. Flanagan has never been a gore director, so the odds he is gesturing at Laugier are slim. The word points somewhere else anyway. The 1973 Exorcist ends with a priest pulling a demon into himself and going out a window, which is martyrdom by any definition the Church would recognize. It has been in this franchise from the start.

iHorror covered Flanagan’s hiring in 2024, when Universal and Blumhouse billed the project as a radical take, and later his description of the job as an opportunity to make the scariest movie he has ever done. Nothing in Richtman’s breakdown contradicts that. Nothing in it confirms it either. Until a trade or the studio says otherwise, this stays in the rumor column.

Updated October 6, 2026: Universal and Blumhouse have since released the first teaser and official plot details, which confirm Father Sunday, the two priests and the 12-year-old son. Read the full story here.