Never mind that it 104% takes place in the world of the Conjuring movies, including a cameo from Tony Amendola as Father Perez shown briefly with Annabelle.
Never mind that it has the same producers, the same 1970’s period-piece settings, the same “R-rated but not gore-drenched” mentality and the same “Catholic dogma is accepted as outright fact” mentality. As someone who rolled my eyes as folks debated whether Life might be a Venom prequel (it was not) or whether A Quiet Place should’ve been a Cloverfield movie (it earned more than every Cloverfield movie combined), I can respect New Line’s insistence that The Curse of La Llorona does not “count” as a Conjuring film. The decision to keep it apart from the ongoing Conjuring franchise is an amusing, if understandable, one.
Moreover, with the poor reviews that greeted the film upon its SXSW debut, it’s possible that New Line and friends preferred to keep the Conjuring brand untarnished even as the lack of an explicit connection may have hurt this specific movie in terms of the global box office. Justice League, The Mummy, Solo: A Star Wars Story and Transformers: The Last Knight (which bent over backward to set up a Transformers “universe” for spin-offs and prequels) failed hard enough to turn the concept from a selling point to a detriment. We’ve now seen DC Films go out of its way to distance itself from interconnected storytelling. In 2019, films that take place in the same universe are distanced from a successful brand. While executives and producers once boasted about cinematic universes before even the first chapter of a Dark Universe (or whatever Hasbro and Paramount are up to) opened, it’s now almost considered the opposite of an enticement. First, the notion of a cinematic universe is less alluring than it was seven years ago. With that track record (only Annabelle earned less than $300 million, and The Nun earned $366 million last September despite poor reviews), why wouldn’t WB and New Line go out of their way to attach Curse of La Llorona to an existing goldmine? To the extent that the filmmakers have discussed the connections while the studio swore otherwise, it might be a handful of intersecting factors.
Throw in The Crooked Man and The Conjuring 3 (directed by Michael Chaves, who just directed The Curse of La Llorona), and you have a fully-functioning cinematic universe that is also a couple installments away from topping $2 billion worldwide in under a decade. It produced one spin-off trilogy ( Annabelle Comes home opens this June) and The Nun with The Nun 2 on the way. Truth be told, The Conjuring Universe, which began with James Wan’s “based on a true-ish story” of the Warrens and their ghostbusting antics, is one of the few outright successful examples. Despite every studio looking at the $1.519 billion gross of The Avengers seven summers ago and tripping over themselves to get their own cinematic universes going, the successful/functioning cinematic universe is still relatively rare.