Warner Bros/New Line’s Conjuring Universe is one of the hottest things going in horror right now, continuing this year with Annabelle Comes Home and then followed by The Conjuring 3 next year. James Wan, who of course directed both of the core Conjuring movies, handed directing duties over to Michael Chaves (The Curse of La Llorona) for the third installment, and it’s looking like we’ve probably seen the last of Wan at the helm of a Conjuring film.
Franchise producer Peter Safran is pretty sure that Wan is letting other filmmakers take over.
“I don’t think he will [direct another Conjuring movie]. That’s just me,” Safran told Cinema Blend. “My instinct is that he won’t. I think he really left everything out on the field with Conjuring 2. Just being by his side as he made that movie, I feel that he put everything that he’d learned up to that point into that film, from character development to scares to crafting sequences, just everything. I love the movie and I think that he felt like he did it, he really showed people exactly what he wanted to show them. The skills of a filmmaker telling a great story.”
He added, “I would be surprised if he ended up doing another one, but you never know. Guys like James, for him scares, it’s in their blood. They need an outlet for it at some point, so maybe he is getting it as a producer. There is something very compelling about sitting there just wanting to scare the shit out of people.”
Before the Conjuring Universe, Wan launched the Saw and Insidious franchises, and he moved on from both early on; he only directed the first Saw, and the first two Insidious films.
But as Safran makes sure to note, “you never know.”
