Corin Hardy’s The Nun may not have been a hit with the critics, but as the highest grossing entry in the Conjuring Universe to date, it’s doubtful that the bosses at Warner Bros. were losing much sleep over a few bad reviews. In fact, the film’s global gross of $365.6 million has made it all too clear that a sequel is on the way.
While a follow-up to the 2018 horror flick has yet to be officially announced, producer Peter Safran recently told Entertainment Weekly that it’s expected to be the next feature written for the franchise.
“I think there is an inevitability to another Nun movie,” Safran said. “We have a really fun storyline for that teed up, so I think that that’s the next one that will be written.”
The demonic nun made her big screen debut in 2016’s The Conjuring 2. In a recently published interview with ComicBook.com, Safran recalled how the Crooked Man was originally intended to be the first character from James Wan’s sequel to get the spinoff treatment, but they ultimately found that audiences were more interested in exploring the nun’s backstory. And so Warner set about giving the fans what they wanted, and the result was one of the highest grossing horror movies of last year.
After teasing sequel plans, Safran went on to explain how The Nun managed to distinguish itself from the rest of the Conjuring Universe.
“After Annabelle 2, we said, ‘We’ve told several families-in-danger in a possessed environment [films],” Safran told EW. “We really wanted to go far away from that in terms of its look, its feel, the geography, the landscape, everything. Once we knew that people were truly interested in The Nun we said, ‘This is a perfect opportunity to take it outside of America, to take it outside of what people are familiar with, and really place it in a unique environment.’ [We] went over there and shot in Transylvania at those incredible hooded-door castles.”
Indeed, Safran has long expressed an interest in expanding the franchise beyond the standard haunted house format. We can also see this change of approach in next year’s The Conjuring 3, which sees the Warrens handle the case of a man on trial for murder who claims he was possessed by a demon. The long-awaited threequel is scheduled for release on September 11th, 2020, but first, The Curse of La Llorona is hitting theaters on April 19th, 2019, followed by Annabelle Comes Home on June 28th.