12 Movies In 2016 That Should Have Flopped (But Didn't)

Commercially successful and critically praised sequels are a tricky thing to master. Perhaps even more so with horror movie sequels that all too often tend to retell the same story with only slightly different scares and characters to distinguish them from their forebears. The Conjuring 2, however, seems to have broken the curse of the sequel, becoming not only 2016’s highest grossing horror movie but one of the highest grossing horrors of all time.

It wasn’t quite as successful as its predecessor, nigh on matching the original film’s $318 million box office profits but on a doubled production budget of $40 million, but that’s quite an astounding feat for a horror sequel nonetheless. Though it doesn’t deviate too far from what has proved to be a successful formula for director James Wan, in The Conjuring 2 he switches the ‘big spooky house dominated by evil entities’ premise seen in his Insidious films and the first Conjuring movie to London and focuses on a real-life British haunting offering just enough plot variation and jump scares for it to be a great horror.