The First Omen is not only expanding The Omen franchise, but it has now finally broken a four-decade-long franchise trend. The horror genre keeps rebooting franchises either with sequels or prequels, and falling into the latter category is The Omen. Over three decades after the last Omen sequel and 18 years after the failed remake, The Omen franchise is back with The First Omen, a prequel to Richard Donner’s 1976 horror classic. The First Omen explores Damien’s origins, with a couple of twists and turns and sinister reveals.
The First Omen takes viewers back to the 1970s to meet American novitiate Margaret Daino (Nell Tiger Free), who arrives at Vizzardeli Orphanage in Rome to take her vows. There she meets orphan Carlita Scianna (Nicole Sorace), with whom she quickly bonds. However, Margaret also discovers something sinister at the orphanage that involves the people in charge of it, as they have all been planning the birth of the Antichrist to create fear and drive people back to the church. The First Omen is not only a return to the franchise, but also the movie that’s finally breaking an old franchise trend.
Like many other franchises in the horror genre, The Omen started strong but the quality of the movies gradually decreased. Despite getting mixed reviews during its initial release, Richard Donner’s The Omen is now considered a horror classic, and as happened with many other now-classic horror movies, time has been good to it. Critics’ opinion of Donner’s The Omen has been more favorable as time goes by, and it now holds an 85% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, praising its use of suspense over shocking imagery to tell Damien’s story.
The commercial success of The Omen made way for a franchise with three sequels and one remake in 2006, of which none was able to match the success and reception of Donner’s film. The First Omen is finally breaking this unfortunate franchise trend by having the highest score in The Omen’s history since the 1976 movie. At the time of writing, The First Omen has a 79% score on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics praising its themes and how it blended a new story with the mythology of The Omen, successfully expanding on it.
As mentioned above, before The First Omen arrived, The Omen franchise struggled to match the quality of the 1976 film. The first sequel, Damien – Omen II, reunited the audience with Damien, now a teenager, with Omen III: The Final Conflict following an adult Damien. Omen IV: The Awakening had a chaotic story about the daughter of Damien, who succeeded him as the Antichrist but was (quite literally) carrying a secret. As seen in the table above, none of The Omen’s sequels achieved a “fresh” score on Rotten Tomatoes, and the 2006 remake was also a big failure.
The Omen’s remake has been labeled as “bad storytelling” and has even been compared to Gus Van Sant’s infamous Psycho remake in terms of being completely unnecessary. Despite being a prequel, The First Omen managed to bring something new while still being part of the franchise’s mythology and answering the biggest questions about Damien’s origins, while also bringing twists and surprises. At 79%, The First Omen has officially broken a terrible Rotten Tomatoes trend for The Omen franchise, but if there’s a continuation to it, it’s to be seen if it will keep this good streak.