Fans of The Conjuring franchise may be wondering where exactly Annabelle Comes Home takes place within the series - and the answer is oddly complicated. The Conjuring franchise began in 2013 and has since gone on to spawn a standalone spinoff in The Nun, a trilogy of spinoffs with the Annabelle franchise, another standalone in The Curse of La Llorona (a debatable case as its director said it wasn't fully part of the universe), and a trio of Conjuring movies. Most recently, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It arrived in cinemas in June 2021.
Many fans noticed that quite a bit of time elapsed between the events of The Devil Made Me Do It and the original Conjuring, with the central cast looking older. This is because the events the movie portrays (with a lot of artistic license) occurred over a decade after the events of The Conjuring, but it has led some viewers to wonder about the franchise’s chronology. With so many spinoffs, the timeline of the interlinked Conjuring, Annabelle, Nun, and (arguably) Curse of La Llorona movies gets pretty knotty.
Specifically, many have wondered where the third Annabelle outing, Annabelle Comes Home, takes place in the mythos, as it is the first movie (since the opening minutes of the original Conjuring) to link characters from both The Conjuring and Annabelle series. The answer, inevitably, is a bit complicated, as Annabelle Comes Home opens before The Conjuring when Ed and Lorraine Warren first encounter the eponymous doll (which, canny viewers will recall, was also depicted in The Conjuring's prologue). However, the timeline then gets fuzzy, as Annabelle Comes Home jumps ahead roughly 4 years to 1972, following the events of the original Conjuring.
This leaves the Warrens’ daughter Judy, the star of Annabelle Comes Home, at ten years old when she and a pair of babysitters are terrorized by the titular doll, rather than the significantly less vulnerable 21 years old that the real-life Judy was when she first saw Annabelle. It’s not unheard of for modern horror franchises to indulge in this sort of chronology-hopping, with the recent Netflix trilogy Fear Street being released in reverse chronological order. However, for Annabelle Comes Home, the complicated timeline is less of an ambitious experiment and more of a case where the filmmakers needed characters to be the right age for the story to make sense.
Not only that, but the creators needed to ensure the Warrens were still at height of their fame during the action of Annabelle Comes Home since the plot centers around their exceedingly unlikely choice to leave their child with a teenage babysitter in a house full of possessed items. This decision is hard to excuse and a pretty standard hoary horror movie cliche, but it is much more believable when viewers are aware the Warrens are in demand and being called out to investigate all manner of paranormal shenanigans. Thus, Annabelle Comes Home takes place between The Conjuring and its sequels, squarely in the middle of the franchise’s timeline.