Smile 2’s Director Thinks the Franchise Can Get Even Wilder

In 2022, Smile released and became a pretty big hit, owing to its simple, but effective premise: an invisible demon disguised as various smiling people terrorizes someone, who then kills themselves in front of somebody else, passing the curse onto them. The visual of someone just endlessly smiling at you is creepy enough on its own, and Paramount marketed the hell out of the thing, so it made a ton of money. And if director/writer Parker Finn has his way, we’ll be seeing more of that weird smile for quite some time.

Talking to SFX Magazine, Finn discussed his appraoch to Smile 2, which is dropping in October. Obviously, the sequel will “show us new things,” but he also explained that some of its ideas were carried over from its predecessor. He didn’t give the game away, but it sounds like there’s plenty more to learn about the Smiling Demon and its whole deal. If you thought the first movie “uncovered the mystery,” Finn said the reveals in that one were more like “a single glass of water out of the ocean.”

Where the original Smile centered on a therapist who witnessed her patient’s suicide, Smile 2 stars Naomi Scott as a pop star now unfortunate enough to be the demon’s next victim. It makes for a significant switch up, and having a famous person as the protagonist widens the scope. Finn never been shy about his hopes that this becomes a franchise, and he reiterated that he’d potential followups to be versatile as this one. “You can find yourself in different stories, different characters, different worlds,” he noted. “It’s really fun to image a lineage of Smile movies where each one becomes more off the rails than the previous one.”

But before we get to Smile 3, 4, and so on, we’ve got to get past Smile 2, which hits theaters on October 18.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.