There isn’t a high-profile horror franchise on the planet that hasn’t suffered from the law of diminishing returns at least once, with The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It stating an oxymoronic case for the James Wan-backed monolith falling into an all-too-familiar trap.
The series is now eight movies deep, and a cumulative box office haul north of $2.1 billion makes it the single highest-grossing spooky property in the history of the business, but there’s been a downturn in quality that’s become increasingly hard to ignore over the most recent couple of chapters.
The Nun is the top-earning entry in the entire Conjuring Universe, but it also holds the weakest Rotten Tomatoes score. Meanwhile, The Devil Made Me Do It hauled in an impressive $206 million from theaters despite releasing simultaneously on HBO Max in the midst of the pandemic, but a 55 percent approval rating on the aggregation site pales in comparison to the 80 and 86 percent of its Wan-directed predecessors.
A sequel to The Nun is on the way, and The Conjuring 4 is sure to happen eventually, but The Crooked Man spinoff getting canceled indicates that the saga isn’t quite as bulletproof as it once was. Either way, The Devil Made Me Do It has cast off its reputation as a crushingly disappointing continuation of a top-drawer saga by becoming reinvigorated on-demand.
Per FlixPatrol, the latest supernatural investigation being spearheaded by the Warrens is one of the Top 10 most-watched features on the Prime Video global charts, because things going bump in the night ain’t ever going out of fashion.