Will there be a Smile 3 after the Smile 2 ending?

You never quite know where a new horror franchise is coming from. Parker Finn probably didn't think that Smile 3 would be such an obvious slam-dunk when he made Laura Hasn't Slept — the 2020 short film on which the original feature was based. And yet, four years later, he's at the helm of one of the most reliable series of horror movies in Hollywood.

The first Smile, released in 2022, managed an enormous global box office haul of $217m (£167m). If the sequel, which is being called an even better movie in first reviews, matches that, then there's no question of whether Smile 3 will happen.

Signs are good in that respect. Smile 2 opened to $46m (£35.3m) worldwide, ahead of the $37.3m (£28.6m) start for its predecessor. So we're almost certainly looking at a Smile 3 in the very near future, but is this something that they set up with the Smile 2 ending? Let's take a look. There are, of course, spoilers for Smile 2.

What happens in the Smile 2 ending?

Pop star Skye Riley is tormented by the curse at the centre of the Smile movies, subsequently ruining all of her professional relationships and ensuring her comeback world tour will be a disaster. She even believes she has murdered her own mother in a fit of rage. Desperate to bring an end to the curse, she agrees to a bizarre experiment.

Morris, the brother of another curse victim, believes that if he "kills" Skye by stopping her heart and then resuscitating her, he can end the curse for good. Skye travels to a disused pizza restaurant where Morris has set up the kit to do the deed. When he leaves the room, she is attacked by one of her visions but manages to inject herself with the drug that should kill her.

Read more: A Cirque du Soleil Performance from Hell: How ‘Smile 2’ Became a Musical (IndieWire, 5 min read)

Unfortunately for Skye, this is all a hallucination and she finds herself on stage at Madison Square Garden on the opening night of the tour. She sees the true, grotesque form of the demon and collapses on stage before killing herself by stabbing a microphone repeatedly into her eye. That leaves her entire audience as potential new victims for the curse.

Will there be a Smile 3?

Smile 3 will definitely happen, but it's not necessarily true that it will need to directly follow on from the events of its predecessor. After all, Skye is definitely dead and so there's no chance they can continue to follow her life.

Finn, though, has plenty of ideas. He told The Hollywood Reporter: "I love this idea that potential future iterations of Smile could go bigger and more off the rails and even crazier and more unhinged. But, for me, what’s important about Smile is that there is a real human, character-driven, intimate nature to the storytelling. So even if the world gets much larger, I’d want to make sure that the stories we’re telling inside of it are still quite impactful on a human level."

Read more: Smile 2 director thinks horror franchise can explore 'different kinds of diverse stories' (BANG Showbiz, 2 min read)

There will likely be a degree of connective tissue, though, in keeping with the history of the franchise. Smile features an early cameo from Caitlin Stasey as the title character of the short film Laura Hasn't Slept, while the prologue to Smile 2 shows how the first film's Joel (Kyle Gallner) dealt with the curse being passed to him.

With that in mind, it's likely that Smile 3 will deal — however briefly — with whoever became the next victim of the curse after Skye's death. Would the parasitic curse latch on to just one member of the audience, or would it hedge its bets and spread more widely?

Read more: Smile 2 debuts with higher Rotten Tomatoes rating than Smile (Digital Spy, 3 min read)

Given the success of Smile 2 in its opening weekend, Finn will likely be at his computer as we speak, hammering away on the script for his next great chiller. Skye didn't manage to shake off the curse and so there's no reason for us to expect that Hollywood will be able to get rid of it. It'll certainly leave the money men smiling.

Smile 2 is in UK cinemas now.