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The last time we saw Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga’s highly fictionalised, and highly adorable, versions of Ed and Lorraine Warren, they were slow dancing to Elvis in The Conjuring 2. It was a romantic sendoff to James Wan’s surprisingly sentimental take on R-rated paranormal horror. Well, while Wan might be gone, and there still hasn't been much movement on The Conjuring 3, Annabelle 3 is offering a backdoor route into the Warrens’ macabre museum, if for only a cameo.
It's unclear how large their roles will actually be in Annabelle 3, although Deadline, who broke the news, reports it will be in a supporting capacity. This is intriguing, because despite Warner Bros. and New Line successfully marketing this as a shared “Conjuring Universe,” by and large there has been a steep wall dividing The Conjuring proper films with the much more schlocky spinoffs, including the previous two Annabelle movies and last month’s The Nun. To date, Farmiga and Wilson have only appeared in movies with “Conjuring” in the title, each of which were directed by James Wan and ostensibly based on a true story. Now that Wan is seemingly done with directing horror for the foreseeable future (he has a little film called Aquaman coming out at the end of the year), it seems the lines are blurring and the universe is tending toward crossovers.
In the new movie, the pair will again play Ed and Lorraine Warren, who in the film will be out of town for at least a large portion of the film, given that writer-director Gary Dauberman revealed at SDCC that the film will be set in the Warrens’ museum/garage where the Annabelle doll raises hell and other spirits to torment the Warrens’ daughter, Judy.
If you don’t recall the full details, Annabelle was introduced in The Conjuring based on a real Warren case where a doll was allegedly possessed by a demon and was placed in the Warren museum of strange and unusual artifacts. Annabelle still teamed with the ghostly witch of that original film to torment Judy as a type of threat to Ed and Lorraine (it didn’t stick). It seems Annabelle still has a bee in her bonnet about the young Warren girl though.
The picture will be Dauberman’s directorial debut, however he has worked on all the scripts of all the Conjuring spinoff movies, as well as the blockbusting It. The film also stars Mckenna Grace as Judy Warren, who replaces Sterling Jerins from the previous Conjuring movies. Madison Iseman, who recently starred in both Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and Goosebumps 2, is also starring in Annabelle 3 as the babysitter charged with keeping Judy safe.
The third Annabelle movie opens on July 3, 2019.
