‘There Are A Lot Of Interesting Roads’: Smile 2 Director Explains What Would Convince Him To Make A Third Horror Flick
SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for Smile 2. If you have not yet seen the new horror movie, proceed at your own risk!
The ending of Smile 2 is absolutely bonkers, and it sets up a potential future for the canon far more terrifying than what unfolds in the third act of the first movie. In Smile, Sosie Bacon’s Rose isn’t able to stop the curse and ends up passing it on to Kyle Gallner’s Joel, but the danger is multiplied by a literal factor of thousands at the end of the sequel. There is clearly a lot to work with should writer/director Parker Finn decide to make a Smile 3 – but whether or not that will actually happen is up in the air, as his north star for continuing the story is finding a proper character-centric story to tell.
Recently speaking with Collider, Finn demonstrated a firm awareness that there are a lot of directions to take the Smile series following the conclusion of Smile 2, and he expressed both his love for the horror genre and the demonic shenanigans of his terrifying big screen creation:
Well, I will say this, I think there are a lot of interesting roads that any future Smile could go down. For me, I love all the stuff that goes bump in the night, and all the really frightening things of the big concept of Smile and the Smiler.
To say that the end of Smile 2 is explosive and mind-blowing is an understatement, as there exists a possibility that the events could very well lead to the end of the world. As noted earlier, the first movie simply ends with the curse being passed from one person (Rose) to another (Joel), but the end of the sequel sees the climactic showdown between Naomi Scott’s Skye Riley and the smiling entity take place in front of a packed arena in New York.
What we know about the Smiler (as Finn calls it) suggests that everyone who experiences the trauma of Skye’s death is now cursed, and the exponential growth that could potentially set off has the chance of being apocalyptic.
With so many people now being afflicted, there are all kinds of options that lay before Parker Finn, but he won’t be making a Smile 3 until he creates a protagonist that inspired a proper story. He added,
But really, for me, Smile is a vehicle to tell really intense and hopefully thoughtful character stories, and so I’d wanna make sure, regardless of if more than one person might have it, that we still find a way to really invest intimacy into the storytelling . That’s super important to me. But I think there are some really interesting tricks still up the sleeves of Smile.
The argument for a Smile 3 is certainly being built on the buzz that Smile 2 has conjured and the business that its been doing at the box office. The sequel has earned great critical acclaim (I gave it four stars in my CinemaBlend review), and after topping the domestic box office in its opening weekend, it has made $86 million worldwide to date, per The Numbers. Clearly there would be a lot of excitement if another film were to move forward, and we’ll keep reporting details as the potential project makes moves towards becoming a reality.
