Director James Wan Offers Up Intel On The Conjuring 3 And The Crooked Man Spinoff

Annabelle: Creation is almost upon us, and for those of you venturing out to catch David F. Sandberg’s horror prequel on the silver screen, keep your peepers peeled for an exclusive 4-minute preview of It.

It is, in essence, a timely primer designed to drum up excitement for the movie’s release in September. As for Creation, New Line and Warner Bros.’ spinoff is all set to become the next chapter in the ever-growing Conjuring universe, and while taking a short breather from Aquaman, executive producer James Wan turned in a status report to Entertainment Weekly about The Conjuring 3 and its upcoming offshoot, The Crooked Man.

First up, the latter; when discussing The Conjuring universe and its many spinoffs (The Nun is another property simmering in development), Wan stressed that each new instalment will have “a very different flavor.”

We think we have a really exciting story. What we want to do, with The Conjuring universe, is we want each of our little offshoots to have a very different flavor, right? So, for example, Annabelle is the classic sort-of haunted doll subgenre. And with The Crooked Man, I would love to push it more down somewhat of that dark fairytale, and more whimsical, subgenre. I love the idea that, within the Conjuring universe, each of our little movies all have their own flavor, so that way they don’t feel like they’re the same films.

So whereas the imminent Annabelle: Creation leans heavily on the haunted house trope, The Crooked Man will seemingly be more akin to a dark fairytale. Variety is the spice of life, as the old saying goes, but it appears James Wan isn’t about to rush into The Conjuring 3 without due consideration. Yes, despite a big push from Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson, all signs point to Wan handing over the keys to another director.

We’ve been working hard on Conjuring 3. Of course, that is something that I am not neglecting. So, we’re in the midst of working on the script, and still hashing [it] out. We want to make sure that the script is in a really good place. With how much people have loved the first two Conjurings, I don’t want to rush in to the third one if possible.

Neither The Conjuring 3 nor The Crooked Man have firm release dates at this early stage, but we’ll keeping a close eye on each project as they begin to coalesce. Annabelle: Creation, meanwhile, haunts theaters on August 11th.