Annabelle Comes Home Producer Gives Update On The Crooked Man Spinoff

The Conjuring Universe is set to expand further with its 2019 slate, starting with the release of The Curse of La Llorona next week, and continuing later in the year with Annabelle Comes Home. However, one project which has been in development for some time now is The Crooked Man, which doesn’t sound like it’s ready to go into production any time soon.

The character of the Crooked Man was first introduced in 2016’s The Conjuring 2, and was announced to have a spinoff in development back in 2017. During ComicBook.com’s visit to the set of Annabelle Comes Home, however, producer Peter Safran explained that this creepy figure eventually took a backseat to one of The Conjuring 2’s other breakout stars.

“There are a bunch of things that we’re exploring in [Annabelle Comes Home] that I just love. That I think are going to be great,” Safran said. “Frequently, the audience tells you what the next one should be. When we did Conjuring 2, we all thought Crooked Man would be the next one out the gate. We just loved it. It was just a great character. Instead, the audience was so fascinated by the nun.”

The producer went on to stress the importance of listening to what the audience wants, which in this case, was a movie expanding on the nun’s backstory.

“With so many people who were directly messaging James [Wan] about what was her origin, who is she, where’d she come … There’s just a real fascination. It was clear that that, in fact, should be the next one,” Safran admitted. “It’s not that we won’t do Crooked Man, but you kind of have to balance out [the franchise]. I’m sure that we have ideas of what we want to do beyond this, from the artifact room, but I suspect that we’ll probably … The audience will tell us exactly what we should be doing.”

After The Nun gave the Conjuring Universe its highest grossing film to date, it’s expected that this particular demon will return to our screens sooner or later. So, where does this leave The Crooked Man? Well, it sounds like Safran hopes to get round to it eventually, but he also seems to be implying that Annabelle Comes Home could launch a spinoff or two based on the frightening figures from the artifact room, which could send the project even further back in the queue.

Either way, we can check back to see what the audience is demanding once Annabelle Comes Home hits theaters on June 28th. In the meantime, The Curse of La Llorona is set to carve out its own space in the Conjuring Universe when it comes out on April 19th.