The film stars Nell Tiger Free, Tawfeek Barhom, Sônia Braga, Ralph Ineson, and Bill Nighy.

They come to realize that the orphanage heads have determined that the Devil will need to mate with his own spawn in order to conceive the Antichrist, and Margaret had been brought to Rome as her half-sister Carlita was too young.

In April 2016, a prequel to The Omen (1976) was announced to be in the works at 20th Century Fox, with Ben Jacoby writing the script and Antonio Campos in talks to direct.

[6] By May 2022, three years after The Walt Disney Company acquired the Fox assets, 20th Century Studios began developing it, with Arkasha Stevenson signing on in her feature directorial debut.

[10] The score was composed by Mark Korven, who wrote original music and referenced themes written by Jerry Goldsmith for the previous films, including "Ave Satani."

[15] Nielsen Media Research, which records streaming viewership on U.S. television screens, calculated that The First Omen was watched for 182 million minutes from May 27 to June 2, 2024, making it the tenth most-streamed film of the week.

[3][4] In the United States and Canada, The First Omen was released alongside Monkey Man, and was initially projected to gross $14–15 million from 3,375 theaters in its opening weekend.

The website's consensus reads: "Frequently frightening even as it plays within the confines of a nearly 50-year-old film series, this prequel is The First Omen of a bright future for the franchise in quite some time.

[23] Kyle Turner of Slant Magazine gave it 3/4 stars, writing, "Throughout the film, Stevenson slides easily between earthly delights and disgusts, wedding them together through viscera and audacious aesthetics.

"[27] The Guardian's Benjamin Lee gave it 3/5 stars, calling it "far more artful and striking than it has any right to be, thanks in overwhelmingly large part to the TV director Arkasha Stevenson, whose bravado works incredibly well until it really doesn't, when she's forced to play by franchise rules rather than her own.

He said, "Stevenson leans too heavily on the old horror staple of female hysteria and the explanation behind the plot to spawn a tiny Antichrist is the kind of thing you'd expect from a conspiracy nutjob on YouTube.

Tiger Free makes a compellingly unstable heroine, though, and Bill Nighy and Charles Dance pop up as senior priests and wear their cassocks well...

"[29] The Wall Street Journal's Kyle Smith wrote, "The First Omen may have a noble predecessor in one of the scariest films of the 1970s, but it has little to distinguish it from the last 665 mediocre horror features I've seen.

"[30] Tim Robey of The Daily Telegraph gave it 2/5 stars, writing, "Stevenson has configured her tale as female body-horror fit for a dissertation, without giving it much of a spine: while slick, the set pieces are few, far between, and over too fast.

"[31] Frank Scheck of The Hollywood Reporter wrote, "Ultimately, it all feels very familiar, and not just because this is the second movie in as many months to revolve around nuns and the birth of an Antichrist.

"[32] Due to sharing similar premises and a common Italian setting and released at about the same time, The First Omen and Immaculate have been dubbed as twin films.

[33] Both films explore the issue of female bodily autonomy, depicting the "systemic control of women's bodies reduced to vessels".

[34] Bilge Ebiri of Vulture wondered about "why should anyone be surprised that suddenly, in the wake of the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade, as state after state attempts to enact religious laws depriving women of bodily agency, America is getting horror movies about people forced into monstrous births by religious institutions worried about their growing irrelevance".