SMILE 2: Director Parker Finn Gets a Deal with Paramount to Make a Sequel to Hit Horror Movie

Parker Finn Gets Deal That Includes Smile 2

When Parker Finn made Smile, he was automatically crowned a horror movie making genius and there will now be a sequel to that hit movie thanks to a recent deal.

Last fall, many people expected big budget, star-studded film affairs like Amsterdam to knock Smile out at the box-office but Smile had an impressive hold and stayed at the top of box-office charts as Halloween approached and the scary movie continued to soar financially. That’s quite impressive for a movie that was originally heading to Paramount Plus to stream. Now, the director of Smile has signed a deal with Paramount that includes a sequel to that juggernaut horror film.

Kevin Bacon’s daughter, Sosie Bacon, starred in Smile as a woman who found herself having hallucinations after dealing with a woman’s suicide. That woman was smiling when she died and a series of events were set into motion within the film in which Bacon’s character tried to avoid a dire fate for herself. It was one wild horror picture to be sure and audiences responded to it rather well. It earned a “B-” CinemaScore grade (good for a horror movie) and, more importantly, it made a whopping $105 million domestically while its competition, Halloween Ends, floundered with a mere $64 million.

Parker Finn is a director who may have the staying power of scary movie directors before him like John Carpenter or Ari Aster. The difference between Finn and Aster is that Finn’s movie was more accessible to mainstream audiences than Aster’s and Paramount is most likely excited by the financial prospects of Smile 2. In contrast Aster’s biggest hit, Hereditary, earned just a “D+” CinemaScore making Smile‘s “B-” look like the valedictorian of horror movies in comparison.

Could Smile movies now be the standard for Halloweens-time for the next several years? That seems like a huge possibility considering that movies like Saw or Paranormal Activity had big follow-up films around future Halloweens from the one the original was released around. The huge hit Saw didn’t even do as well financially as Smile did so the sky could be the limit for this new franchise if Paramount can keep the plot of the sequel (s) fresh and interesting. Paramount was the driving force behind the hit Paranormal Activity movies’ successes.

Finn is the next big filmmaker to watch and there could be non-Smile movies in the director’s future as well. Sosie Bacon, the star of the original movie, wasn’t a huge actress at the time but was just a good enough performer to carry the film towards success. The casting of the sequel is sure to be interesting and as long as the protagonist is as strong as Bacon was in the first film, Smile 2 will be laughing all the way to the bank considering how great its box-office receipts could be.

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