After an escalating string of horror remakes throughout the 2000s and 2010s, these franchises started realizing that there was gold to mine in going the soft reboot approach. You appease the previous generation of the original film, while wiping away the previous batch of sequels to make a new film the true follow-up. Established characters could come back amid a new ensemble, so as to not lose the prospect of new audiences. That’s how you get the likes of “Candyman” (2021), “Scream” (2022), and David Gordon Green’s “Halloween” trilogy.

Green’s “The Exorcist: Believer” showed bright spots, yet ultimately fell victim to the worst of legacy sequel tropes. Even though “The Exorcist,” one of the greatest horror films ever made, has had its share of follow-ups, it’s always been a weird beast to franchise. Possession movies had already dried up just about everything the 1973 film made famous. But would you believe that prior to “Believer,” the “Exorcist” was already given the great legacy sequel treatment for television?