‘Smile 2’ has a brutal ending that blows the horror franchise’s potential future wide open

“Smile 2” initially opens on a character we met in the first movie: Kyle Gallner’s Joel, a police officer and Rose’s ex-boyfriend who witnessed her death by self-immolation at the end of the 2022 film and thereby inherited the curse from her. It seems at first as though he’ll be the person we’re following in the sequel, but that’s a misdirect.

In reality, Joel is only in the first few minutes of the movie, where we see him kill a drug dealer’s lackey in an attempt to relieve himself of the curse by passing it on to another person (the first film established that the only loophole for escaping the Smile Entity involves killing another person yourself and making sure someone sees it). Things go sideways almost immediately, when Joel accidentally shoots and kills the drug dealer himself, then is run down and killed by a car when he flees the drug dealer’s gang.

A new character, low-level drug dealer Lewis (Lukas Gage), is the unwitting recipient of the curse after he accidentally sees Joel kill both the dealer and his lackey when he’s stopping by to pick up drugs. But Lewis, too, isn’t long for this world; he’s only the vehicle by which the entity’s curse is passed on to our new leading lady — troubled pop star Skye Riley (Naomi Scott).

Throughout the film, Skye contends with being haunted by the entity, which often takes the form of her overzealous fans (including one creeper from a meet-and-greet who attacked her). She gets support from her former friend Gemma, who surprisingly easily agrees to forgive Skye for her toxic behavior throughout their friendship when Skye reaches out for help in the early days of the curse.

Meanwhile, Skye is also receiving incessant text messages from a stranger who tells her that they know she was at Lewis’ apartment the night he died. After a disastrous charity appearance leads to a meltdown when the entity takes the form of Skye’s dead boyfriend, she finally agrees to meet with the texter and learns he’s a potential ally: Morris (Peter Jacobson), an ER nurse, who tells her that his brother was also a victim of the Smile Entity further back in the chain.

Upon meeting, Morris tells Skye that he believes the only way they can stop the entity for good is to stop Skye’s heart while she’s alone in a room, temporarily killing her and thereby depriving the entity of a host to jump over to.

Initially, Skye is horrified by the suggestion. But things rapidly get even worse for her. Later, she returns to her apartment, where she’s confronted by the entity, which has taken the form of a swarm of her fans. They attack her, and one reaches its hand into her mouth, apparently to possess her.

When Skye awakens, she’s in a private rehab facility, being watched over by her mother and Joshua. Left alone, Skye and her mother have a confrontation where her mother rails against her for letting everyone down by asking to cancel the tour. Soon, Skye’s mother is revealed to be the entity in disguise, which we see stab itself repeatedly with a broken shard of mirror.

Skye goes to flee before realizing she’s covered in blood: It looks like she killed her own mother, despite Skye (and the audience) seeing the entity stab itself.

Skye’s very much alive mom and Joshua are in the audience, appearing to suggest that it wasn’t just the previous scene in the freezer that wasn’t real but everything that happened at the private rehab facility too, including Skye’s apparent murder of her mother.

A horrified Skye looks out on the massive, cheering crowd from the stage, then sees the entity (now appearing as a double of her current self in her concert outfit) in front of her. The double tears open its scar and the entity emerges from its corpse, climbing into Skye’s mouth and possessing her.

The movie then cuts to the audience’s perspective, where it appears that Skye is having a seizure onstage; the entity isn’t visible to them. The concerned audience cheers when Skye recovers and gets up, a broad smile covering her face.

Having successfully possessed Skye, the entity forces Skye to kill herself on stage in front of thousands of fans. We don’t actually see Skye kill herself, but the camera remains focused on the horrified reactions of the concert attendees watching it happen. In the final shot, we see Skye, lying dead on stage, with her glittering microphone stabbed through her eye. A literal mic drop.

What does this mean for ‘Smile 3’ and the franchise’s future?

The first “Smile” movie was a box-office smash back in 2022, making over $217 million worldwide. Deadline even named it one of the year’s most valuable blockbusters in terms of profit. It doesn’t appear that was a one-off either; “Smile 2” is tracking well so far, topping the first film’s debut with a $23 million opening. That all makes it hard to imagine Paramount wouldn’t want to order more sequels if writer-director Parker Finn is game.

The ending of “Smile 2” cleverly opens up the world of the franchise so that future installments could go in any number of directions. Now that an arena full of fans have witnessed Skye’s death at the hands of the entity (plus the millions more who probably watched it streaming), it could conceivably infect any, or all, of them, theoretically spreading its curse worldwide.

(And maybe wiping out humanity in the process? Who’s to say!)

Finn also avoided a common genre pitfall: overly explaining the nature of your monster. Viewers end “Smile 2” just as clueless about the nature of this creature as they were at the end of the first movie. None of the characters have any idea what this thing is, or whether it has any weaknesses that would allow it to be defeated, and neither do we.

Hopefully, Finn will continue to remain at the helm of the franchise should it continue. He’s already said he’s got plans for a third movie lined up, though “Smile 3” hasn’t been officially confirmed yet.

“There are some ideas that I think are very exciting. I think it’s really fun to imagine a lineage of ‘Smile’ movies where each one becomes more off the rails than the previous one,” Finn told SFX Magazine.

“Smile 2” is now in theaters.