Will there be a ‘Smile 2?’ The ending of ‘Smile,’ explained

The following article contains spoilers for Smile.

Releasing a new horror movie at the beginning of the Halloween season is usually a great idea, and Smile joins a long list that proves it. Smile premiered on Sept. 22, 2022, while officially having its theatrical release on Sept. 30, 2022. It has already made back its budget at the box office, raking in over $36 million in the worldwide market after costing $17 million to make. The film has also done well critically and with audiences, earning a 75 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes.

Written and directed by Parker Finn, Smile follows a therapist named Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) as she is plagued by a curse that kills its target within the week. The curse is passed to her when she sees a new patient Laura Weaver (Caitlin Stasey) commit suicide in front of her. Dr. Cotter is soon plagued by a smile creeping onto the faces of people she knows, and she soon experiences blackouts and the murder of her cat. After discovering that Laura saw her professor commit suicide as well, Dr. Cotter comes to realize that a curse had passed through Laura’s professor to Laura to her.

The film continues as Dr. Cotter attempts to break the curse and finish out the seven days with her life (and sanity) intact. But was she successful enough to appear in a possible sequel to the film? Let’s take a look at the ending of Smile and unpack the possibilities for Smile 2.

Will there be a Smile 2?

As Dr. Cotter tried to find the key to destroying or avoiding the curse, she enlisted the help of Joel (Kyle Gallner), her ex-boyfriend. As a police officer, he was able to look into the string of suicides that occurred before Laura’s suicide and trace it back to an individual who did not kill themselves but instead murdered someone else. After visiting the man, Robert Talley (Rob Morgan) in prison, murder is confirmed as the only known way to get rid of the curse.

Unable to kill another person, Dr. Cotter hatches a plan to rid herself of the curse. Realizing that the curse feeds off trauma, she decides to isolate herself so that even if the curse does decide to take her life, nobody will be around to witness it and the curse will finally end with her. She journeys to an old house that she and her sister are in possession of because it used to belong to their mother who died from an overdose when Dr. Cotter was younger.

Alone in the secluded house, at first Rose successfully manages to beat the smile curse, as it takes the shape of her dead mother. She attempts to burn the curse alive as it has transformed from her dead mother into a monstrosity. The monstrosity does burn and she manages to escape back to Joel’s apartment, seemingly outliving the curse and ending its streak once and for all. Except a smile creeps onto Joel’s face and Rose realizes that she is still in the dilapidated house. When she attempts to escape Joel arrives in the driveway and she realizes that it is too late.

The entity behind the curse realizes that someone else has come to witness Rose’s suicide so it forces Rose to douse herself in gasoline, and light herself on fire. With Dr. Cotter dead and Joel as a witness to her suicide, the curse presumably passed to him. So where could Smile 2 go after Dr. Cotter’s death? Well, we could follow Joel as he tries to outlive the seven days by picking up the sequel right after the original. Interestingly, this is a way Rose could return in the sequel and as she saw her dead mother, Joel could see her. 

A follow-up to Smile could totally skip Joel, and go to someone who finally manages to end the curse. Or, it could even go in the opposite direction and show us the origins of the curse. They set up the curse with some ambiguity so there are actually quite a few creative directions they could take the premise should they want to make a franchise out of the idea. The director has said that he has not ruled out a follow-up to the film and combined with the early financial success of the film, it would not be a surprise to see a sequel sometime in the future.

If you think Smile 2 could be a good movie, it’s almost certain that an increased box office return would make the chances of a sequel skyrocket, so make sure you catch Smile while it is in theaters now.