During what has so far been a lackluster summer season, James Wan's The Conjuring 2 is a bona-fide hit. And with good reason. Wan is a spectacular horror director, working with two solid actors in Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga as they plunder the supernatural cases of the Warrens. The first Conjuring was a hit. The sequel's a hit. So you can understand why Warner Bros. would WANT the series to continue, but you might not have correctly guessed HOW it will proceed.
There will be a Conjuring 2 spinoff, according to The Hollywood Reporter, but it will not involve the Warrens, or any other original monsters from their back catalogue. Instead, the trade says that James Wan and Peter Safran are co-producing The Nun, a spinoff centered around the demonic entity that haunted Lorraine Warren (Farmiga) during The Conjuring 2. The trade notes that Conjuring 2 co-writer David Leslie Johnson will handle scripting duties on this spinoff movie. No word on who might direct, but we can count Wan out, as he's about to dive into Aquaman for the studio.
So, who is The Nun? If you saw The Conjuring 2, you remember that Lorraine started seeing this ghostly figure in the Amityville Horror House. It followed her home, and even inspired her husband, Ed (Wilson), to paint a ghastly oil painting of the figure. The Nun resurfaced in the movie's finale, and was largely responsible for the new haunting with which the Warrens were contending.
What's most amusing is that James Wan recently admitted that he didn't have the visual cooked up for The Nun until post-production and reshoots occurred on The Conjuring 2. He knew that he'd need something memorable, and he came up with this horrific image.
It worked so well, she's now getting her own movie. This isn't new to the series. Annabelle, the haunted puppet doll, was so creepy in the first Conjuring movie that she, too, got her own spinoff movie back in 2014. That movie made more than $250 million globally, showing that audiences who liked James Wan's brand of horror were willing to follow him down different avenues... even as a producer.
Now, having seen The Conjuring 2, I thought a spinoff movie would involve The Crooked Man, the tall and lanky figure that continued to haunt the English family. I suppose that's still possible, but for the moment, The Nun will be the story that continues the Conjuring saga. What do you think? Will you check it out?
