Movies
Lili Taylor And Ron Livingtson Apparate On Wan’s ‘The Conjuring’, Film Could Get A Title Change
Lili Taylor and Ron Livingston have signed on to the new James Wan (Insidious) film for New Line, The Conjuring. They join previously announced Patrick Wilson (Young Adult, Watchmen and Insidious) and Vera Farmiga (The Departed, Orphan).
Per The Hollywood Reporter, “Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor, both actors who cut their teeth in the indie scene, are in negotiations to join Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga in New Line’s supernatural thriller formerly known as ‘The Conjuring’. Now under the working title of the Untitled Warren Files Project, the script, written by Chad and Carey Hayes, centers on a a husband and wife team (Wilson, Farmiga) of demonologists and psychic investigators who enter the most horrifying case of their career, spirits in a Rhode Island farmhouse. Livingston and Taylor will play a couple who move with their kids to the farmhouse and begin to be haunted.”
Untitled Warren Files Project? Sounds like this whole thing will be getting a new name.
The project is inspired by the true-life story of the Perron family, who claimed they “lived among the dead” in the 1970s as spirits both friendly and sinister inhabited their Rhode Island farmhouse.
The film, “inspired by the supernatural events that happened in the Rhode Island home of the Perron family,” would have the director returning to the realm of domestic haunts. Originally on Summit’s radar, New Line stepped in and bought the pitch when talks fell through.
Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.
First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.
Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.
Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.
“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”
She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”
At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.
Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.
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