Immaculate — Sydney Sweeney’s new horror movie — has its title changed in Russia and the film’s director is baffled by the bizarre interpretation.
Following the film’s debut at the SXSW Film Festival last month and a limited run in theaters domestically, Immaculate was released this week on premium video on demand.
However, Immaculate is still opening in theaters overseas and it seems that the title of the movie in Russia got lost in translation. Now — as director Michael Mohan revealed in a post on X on Thursday — the film’s title on the Russian movie poster is a baffling combination of Immaculate and another religion-based horror thriller recently released in theaters.
Mohan wrote in the X post, Holy s — t. Am I reading this correctly? Did our Russian distributor change the title of our film to OMEN. IMMACULATE?
At least the poster got the Immaculate part right. The other part seems to be a reference to The First Omen, which is the new prequel movie to the 1976 classic The Omen.
The poster’s title treatment and other bits of production information are written in Russian. In response to Mohan’s post, one commenter verified that omeh is indeed a translation of omen by showing screenshots of the new poster of The First Omen — as well as the original version of The Omen — in Russian.
Apart from both films being released within weeks of one another, the new horror movies Immaculate and The First Omen, coincidentally, have some key similarities.
Immaculate, which was released in theaters on March 22 ahead of its recent PVOD release, stars Sydney Sweeney as a young nun who relocates from America to an Italian convent to discover some sinister happenings within the church and shockingly — that she is somehow pregnant.
In The First Omen — which was released domestically in theaters on April 5 — Nell Tiger Free stars as a young novitiate who relocates from America to Rome, where she tries to validate a conspiracy that a faction of the church is trying to birth a new Antichrist.
Whether the misinterpretation of Immaculate’s title in Russian will hurt the film’s box office prospects in the country is yet to be seen.
If there’s any consolation for director Michael Mohan, commenters on the filmmaker’s post pointed out that the director’s movie isn’t the first film title misinterpreted in Russian, citing several different examples.
Perhaps not so coincidentally, Mohan is following 666 users on X as of this writing. In The Omen and The First Omen, the numeral 666 signifies the mark of the beast.
