Smile 3 Has a New Director, and Parker Finn Is Leaving to Remake Possession With Margaret Qualley

Photo: Laura Alier, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Paramount has handed Smile 3 to David Bruckner, and Parker Finn, who wrote and directed the first two, is stepping back to produce. Nick Antosca writes. The report started as a Daniel Richtman rumour, Dread Central verified it, and Variety and TheWrap confirmed it within the day. No date, no cast, no plot, just a director and a writer, which for a franchise that has made over 350 million dollars on two films is enough to be news.

Photo: MIchael Gluzman, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Bruckner is a good get. He made The Ritual, the Netflix forest horror that is better than its reputation, The Night House with Rebecca Hall, which is one of the scariest films of the decade and almost nobody saw it, and the 2022 Hellraiser reboot for Hulu that treated the material with real respect. He does dread rather than jump scares. Smile has always been a jump-scare franchise with a dread idea underneath it, so the fit is interesting.

Photo: Mutante, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Finn is not going far. He developed the framework for the third film and stays on as producer with Temple Hill, and the reason he is not directing is that he is making a remake of Possession, the 1981 Andrzej Zulawski film with Isabelle Adjani losing her mind in a Berlin subway, for Paramount. Callum Turner and Margaret Qualley star and it is dated June 11, 2027. That is a wild thing to remake, and Finn is a wild enough choice.

Photo: Pietro Luca Cassarino, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Antosca is the Channel Zero and The Act writer, and Brand New Cherry Flavor, and his stuff is body horror with a sense of humour, which is the Smile register exactly. Smile 2 took the curse to a pop star and I thought it was the rare sequel that improved on the original. A third film has to find a new host and a new world, and a writer who likes grotesque spectacle is the right person to find it.

Photo: Harald Krichel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

No date means 2028 at the earliest. Did Smile 2 make you a believer, or is this a franchise that already said what it had to say?