Sep, 6 2025
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The highest-grossing horror franchise in history is choosing to end while it’s still winning. After a 12-year run and more than $2.3 billion at the global box office, The Conjuring is set to close its main chapter with 'The Conjuring: Last Rites.' Director Michael Chaves says the move wasn’t driven by fatigue or falling returns, but by a rare creative choice: finish on a high, not on fumes.
Chaves, who returns to the Warrens’ world for the finale, described a clear consensus between filmmakers and studio brass. There was, he says, a shared feeling that the story of Ed and Lorraine Warren had reached a natural end. In his words: stop at the peak. The mandate was simple and hard to argue with in horror, a genre famous for endless sequels: choose your final chapter before the audience senses a decline.
The irony isn’t lost on Chaves. He admits he would have kept making these films as long as he could. 'They had to pull me away from it,' he says, half-joking and dead serious at once. That personal enthusiasm, he argues, is exactly why he’s relieved others made the call. When creators love a world, they rarely want to leave it. Producers James Wan and Peter Safran, along with the studio, decided this was the moment to lock a finish and protect the brand’s legacy.
That phrase — on our own terms — comes up a lot around this film. Horror history is filled with iconic series that ran long and retooled themselves until the original spark got blurry. The Conjuring team is doing the opposite: drawing a line while the audience is still leaning forward. Chaves says the goal isn’t to shut a door in fans’ faces but to give the Warren storyline something franchises almost never get — closure that feels earned.
Tonally, the director calls 'Last Rites' a return to basics. Expect a feel closer to the 2013 original than his previous entry, 'The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It,' which bent toward a legal thriller. Through heavy test screening, he says, viewers kept using the same phrase: full circle. For a series that grew to include cursed objects, demonic nuns, and spin-off mythology, coming back to the core — a haunted house atmosphere and a marriage under siege by the supernatural — became the north star.
Why now? Partly because the Warrens’ arc has a natural bookend. Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga’s performances have always been the series’ anchor. Their bond, their faith, and their fear gave the jump scares stakes. Stretch that arc past its shape, and you risk turning the couple into avatars for more set pieces. Chaves, Wan, and Safran saw an opening to end their journey while the characters still feel human, not mythic mascots.
There’s also the bigger franchise playbook. When a series scales to this size, each new entry has to serve two masters: the specific story in front of you and the larger universe behind it. The Conjuring solved that trick better than most by keeping the Warrens’ cases personal, even as the universe expanded around them. Ending that spine while leaving side doors cracked for future ideas protects both parts — the mainline saga stays tidy, and the broader world isn’t welded shut.
Chaves’s role in all this is notable. With 'Last Rites,' he becomes the filmmaker who has directed the most titles in the series, after 'The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It' and 'The Nun II.' That consistency matters. He’s walked the line between the series’ spiritual roots — possession stories grounded in faith and marriage — and the gothic, operatic flair that audiences expect. He talks about this finale like a responsibility: give longtime fans the texture of the first film, not just the iconography.
Listen to how he describes the movie’s test screenings: not as an algorithmic tool, but as a reality check on tone. When those viewers said it felt like a circle closing, he knew the story was aimed right — less courtroom maneuvering, more candlelit dread, slower-burn set pieces, the sense that every shadow has a pulse. He’s not hiding that the playbook goes back to the early scares: quiet, then a snap; patience, then a shock you feel in your teeth.
That doesn’t mean the film shrinks from scale. The Conjuring has always balanced its haunted-house beats with big Catholic imagery, relics, and rituals. But under the spectacle, the series worked because the Warrens felt like partners who believed in each other as much as they believed in God. Ending their chapter means chasing that feeling rather than stacking mythology for mythology’s sake. You don’t need a new demon every time; you need a new way to test a marriage under siege.
It’s impossible to talk about this decision without mentioning the numbers. New Line and Warner Bros. shepherded a machine that cut across eras of theatrical moviegoing — pre-pandemic, mid-pandemic, and the hybrid churn that followed. Through all that, this brand kept drawing crowds. The producers could easily have kept mining the vault. Instead, they’re playing a longer game: lock in a satisfying end and keep the audience’s trust for whatever comes next.
If you want a quick snapshot of how this world scaled, look at the roster it built over a decade. The mainline 'Conjuring' trilogy bookends the Warrens’ narrative. The 'Annabelle' films turned a cursed doll into a reliable theatrical draw. The 'Nun' entries spun one terrifying visage into a gothic mini-franchise. Each thread fed the others without turning everything into a cameo parade. That structure is why the team feels confident bringing the core line to a finish without closing every window.
As for the decision-makers, the names are familiar. James Wan helped launch the original and has stayed close as a guiding voice. Peter Safran has been the franchise’s steady hand on the producing side. Together with the studio, they backed a move many franchises avoid: prioritizing the shape of the story over the endless loop of annual releases. In horror, that restraint is almost radical.
Chaves is blunt about his own bias — he’d have kept going forever. But he also sounds relieved that he didn’t have to be the one to call last shot. That separation of passion from planning is what often saves a brand. When creators are this close to the work, the instinct is to push for one more. Having leadership that says, no, this is the ending, protects everyone from drifting into the kind of repetition fans notice right away.
So what will 'Last Rites' feel like? Chaves points to a cleaner spine: fewer detours, more time with Ed and Lorraine. The movie leans into the dread that made 2013 hit so hard — careful sound design, creeping camera moves, restraint before release. The team also wanted it to feel like a summation without turning into a clip reel. That’s where test screenings mattered: viewers flagged the moments that felt like echoes of the first film in a good way, not the kind that reads as self-quotation.
All of this sits on a simple truth: The audience shows up for the Warrens. Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga’s chemistry is the emotional engine. Their scenes — a look across a room, a prayer whispered under breath before a door opens — give the movies their heartbeat. Ending with the pair front and center gives the franchise the best shot at landing soft and strong.
In a bigger sense, the choice maps to how modern franchises survive. You can run forever and risk thinning out what made the story special, or you can draw borders and end with a feeling. The Conjuring team is betting on the latter. It’s not retirement from ghost stories. It’s a promise about this couple and this arc. That boundary doesn’t hurt the brand; it makes it easier to get excited when the next idea from this world appears.
And yes, Chaves leaves the door open a crack. Spin-offs are possible. New characters could carry threads forward. Horror is nothing if not modular — a mask, a relic, a figure in the hallway can launch a new sub-series if there’s a story behind it. The point is that the mainline Warren story won’t be stretched to cover every future move. That freedom is the perk of picking your endpoint.
One more bit of context: longevity and trust. Fans have stuck with these films because they deliver what they promise — a grounded couple facing ungrounded evil — while still shifting the tone and locale. England, Rhode Island, courtrooms, farmhouses, artifacts rooms, abbeys. The settings diversified without losing the baseline of faith vs. fear. Ending now says to those fans: we heard you, and we’ll leave you with the feeling that first pulled you in.
Which brings us back to the unusual part. The choice wasn’t a white flag; it was a design choice. In Chaves’s framing, finishing the Warren saga while it’s healthy is the best way to honor the movies that built this thing. He calls it an honor to be the one steering the finale, and you can hear both pride and pressure in that word. Full circle only works if the circle actually closes.
It’s hard to overstate how rare this is in horror. More often, franchises obfuscate endings with soft reboots, or they hand the brand back and forth to stretch one more opening weekend. Here, the creative team is staking the future on a cleaner move: the main couple’s story stops here. If the universe returns in another form later, it will earn its way back with a fresh hook rather than leaning forever on the same names.
For now, the assignment is clear. Deliver the Warren finale, tuned to the original’s haunted-house DNA, and send the couple off with grace. That mindset, more than any marketing claim, is why this ending is landing with fans. The filmmakers aren’t promising bigger. They’re promising truer. And in a genre that often confuses size with fear, that might be the most radical promise of all.
By any metric, this has been a remarkable run. Across the mainline films and spin-offs, the series became a rare horror machine that operated like a four-quadrant franchise without losing its core. The numbers don’t lie, and the consistency is even harder to fake. Year after year, the brand held the line at the box office while streaming, windows, and audience habits shifted under its feet.
That staying power comes down to a balance the team never abandoned: spectacle outside, sincerity inside. Haunted basements, creaking abbeys, cursed heirlooms — all attached to two people whose faith and fear felt legible. You can change the demon and the wallpaper. You can’t fake the marriage. Ending the Warren arc while that bond still feels real preserves the piece that made everything else work.
What happens after the curtain call? The door isn’t locked. Chaves hints that the world could sprout new branches — characters we haven’t met, corners the Warrens never walked into. But there’s a difference between opportunity and obligation. The producers aren’t promising a conveyor belt; they’re holding space for the right idea when it arrives.
That future, whatever it looks like, stands on a foundation most horror lines envy. The brand is intact, the audience’s trust is intact, and the central story is ending by choice. However the next chapter forms, it won’t have to fight against franchise baggage it didn’t create. That clean slate is the reward for choosing a finish line instead of chasing the last dollar.
All told, the decision to wrap the mainline saga reads like a confidence play. It says the people behind this world believe it’s big enough to pause without disappearing. It says they value memory as much as momentum. And it treats fans not as a resource to be harvested but as an audience that can feel when a story finds its last beat.
The title of the finale says it plainly. Last Rites isn’t a wink; it’s a promise. It doesn’t bury the broader The Conjuring Universe. It lays the Warren story to rest with intention — the way most horror series wish they could, and rarely do.
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