That's a misleading statement, of course, because it takes more into consideration how bad the first movie was as opposed to the sequel actually being great. In terms of the varying quality from movie to movie, you could say that this is one of the best horror sequels of all time. The reason I bring this up is because, much like Ouija's sequel (Origin of Evil) this is a vastly superior movie to the original. Only thing I remember is that Annabelle Wallis, yes, gave a really bad performance in her role. Perhaps not as awful as the original Ouija was, but still really bad. I say that because, I thought the first Annabelle was a very bad movie. Regardless, let's get going on the movie, shall we? This sequel presents an interesting conundrum. So, unless Universal and Warner Bros decided to work together, this won't be a shared universe. There's been no confirmation that all of these films exist in the same universe since, for some reason, this movie (and its prequel) were Distributed by Universal instead of Warner Bros, who distributed the film that this is a spin-off from (The Conjuring). I don't want to say that all of these movies are interchangeable, but I can see how someone might confuse this with another of the movies I just mentioned. The reason that these movies share a universe is, because, realistically speaking, they share a lot of similarities in style, form of presenting their horror and tone. And, even then, those movies still don't have as identifiable villains as the Universal monsters. I suppose you could include the Ouija movies in there as well, though, in the case of Ouija, there's not a clear definable villain as, say, there may be in the aforementioned movies. Having seen this movie, however, I could say that there's already a shared universe with films like Annabelle (duh), The Conjuring (major duh) and Insidious (triplicate duh). So I was talking, a couple of days ago, about Universal doing their own cinematic universe using their famous horror monsters from the 20s-50s starting with The Mummy, which was a major misfire.