Warner Bros. promised audiences a Conjuring finale and handed them a blockbuster instead, so the studio is doing the natural thing and going back to the start. The Conjuring: First Communion has found its young Ed and Lorraine Warren, with Garrett Wareing and Amanda Fix cast in the lead roles. Shooting is already underway for a theatrical release on September 10th, 2027.
Who Are Garrett Wareing And Amanda Fix?
Wareing steps in as a young Ed Warren. He made his debut at 13 opposite Dustin Hoffman in the 2014 drama Boychoir, then built out a TV run with recurring parts on Pretty Little Liars: The Perfectionists and Manifest, before headlining the Netflix western Ransom Canyon in 2025.
Fix plays a young Lorraine Warren, the clairvoyant half of the pairing. Her credits include North of Normal, the Prime Video music drama Daisy Jones & the Six, and Orphan Black: Echoes. Neither actor is a household name yet, which is very much the point of a prequel.
A Prequel Origin Story, And A Serious Recast Gamble
This is a straight-up origin story. Rather than continue the Warrens' late-career casework, First Communion rewinds to their early demonological days, the stretch before they became the most famous ghost hunters in America. Plot specifics are locked down tight. The title itself points toward a haunting tied to a child's first communion, exactly the Catholic-horror territory the series has always mined.
Rodrigue Huart directs, making his feature debut after landing the job off a short film. The script comes from Richard Naing and Ian Goldberg, the duo behind the very well-liked haunted-morgue chiller The Autopsy of Jane Doe. Peter Safran produces through The Safran Company, with John Rickard, Natalia Safran, and Romel Adam executive producing.
Here is the real weight of this news. Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga have played Ed and Lorraine across four main Conjuring films since 2013, and their chemistry is the load-bearing wall of a universe that has cleared more than two billion dollars worldwide. Handing those two roles to new faces is the single biggest gamble the series has taken. Get the casting right and the franchise has a fresh runway for decades. Get it wrong and audiences feel the absence in the first frame.
For the completists: the wider Conjuring Universe already spans nine films, counting the Annabelle and Nun spin-offs, and an HBO Max series is also in development. A young-Warrens story is the one corner these movies have never actually shown, which makes it the obvious next expansion.
The timing tells the rest. Marketed hard as the finale, The Conjuring: Last Rites landed in 2025 as the ninth entry, following Ed and Lorraine into the Smurl family haunting under director Michael Chaves. Then it posted the biggest worldwide opening weekend any horror movie has ever had and rolled to a franchise-best haul north of 480 million dollars globally. That is no small feat for a series James Wan launched all the way back in 2013, and a finale that earns like that does not stay a finale for long.
So the door the studio said it was closing is open again, only now it points backward, into the past instead of forward. First Communion opens September 10th, 2027, giving Wareing and Fix a little over a year to convince a very protective fanbase that the Warrens can outlive their original stars.
Here is the question the next year will answer: can any two actors inherit Ed and Lorraine Warren after Wilson and Farmiga, and is a young-Warrens origin the prequel this universe actually needed?
Let us know in the comments!
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