Smile 3: David Bruckner to Direct, Nick Antosca to Write

Paramount has hired David Bruckner to direct Smile 3 and Nick Antosca to write the screenplay. Variety reported the hire on October 28, 2026. Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter published the same credits that evening. Parker Finn, who wrote and directed Smile (2022) and Smile 2 (2024), pitched the framework for the third film and stays on as a producer alongside Temple Hill. Jonathan Fass is executive producer.

No plot, cast, production start or release date is in those reports. Smile 3 is a development hire. It is not a dated release, so it is not on the release calendar as a day, month or season.

Finn is directing a different Paramount film

Variety and The Hollywood Reporter both report that Finn is directing Paramount’s remake of Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 film Possession. Callum Turner and Margaret Qualley star. Both outlets date that film to June 11, 2027. Deadline connects Finn’s absence from the Smile 3 director’s chair to that remake. The June date belongs to Possession. It is not a Smile 3 date.

THR dates Finn’s first-look deal with Paramount Pictures to 2023, after Smile became a theatrical hit. The deal explains why he is still inside Paramount’s horror slate. It does not assign him the Smile 3 screenplay.

Who Bruckner and Antosca are

Variety and THR list Bruckner’s earlier features as the 2022 Hellraiser reboot, The Night House (2020) and The Ritual (2017). Our review of The Ritual covers that film on its own. It is not a review of Smile.

The same Variety report lists other Bruckner attachments that are not this sequel: he is writing and developing a new The Blob for Warner Bros., he is attached to Universal’s adaptation of The Caretaker with Sydney Sweeney, and he is set to direct Mice for A24. Those are separate projects named in the hiring story. None of them is described as a Smile film.

Variety identifies Antosca as the creator of Apple’s Cape Fear miniseries, a co-creator of Hulu’s The Act, and the writer of Antlers (2021) and the Colleen Hoover adaptation Verity. Deadline and THR name him as the Smile 3 screenwriter. They do not publish his draft, an outline or a title change.

What the first two films already are

Smile premiered at Fantastic Fest on September 22, 2022, and opened in US theaters on September 30, 2022. Sosie Bacon plays therapist Rose Cotter. The running time on Wikipedia is 115 minutes. Smile 2 opened in US theaters on October 18, 2024, runs 127 minutes, and stars Naomi Scott as pop star Skye Riley, with Kyle Gallner returning as Joel. Those dates are the films that exist. They are not a schedule for the third.

Variety notes that each Smile film has worked as its own story with a new lead, and that it is unclear who will appear in the third. A returning actor would be a later announcement. The watch order and ending guide separates the release order, the curse rules and the two endings from this hiring news.

The grosses attached to the report

Variety’s October 28 account gives Smile $105 million domestically and $217 million worldwide, and Smile 2 $69 million domestically and $139 million worldwide against a $28 million budget. Variety puts the series past $350 million worldwide. Wikipedia’s film pages list $217.4 million for Smile, on a $17 million budget, and $138.1 million for Smile 2. The gap is rounding and source timing. October 28 did not bring a new studio gross.

A quote that is not a premise

THR’s hiring story quotes Finn from an interview after Smile 2, not from a Smile 3 set. He said there were “a lot of really exciting places that Smile could go to from here,” including versions that go “bigger and more off the rails and even crazier and more unhinged,” and that he would still want stories that stay “quite impactful on a human level” if the world got larger. That is his stated hope for later films. It is not a scene list, a location or a confirmation that Bruckner is enlarging the scale.

Deadline calls the framework Finn pitched “trilogy-completing.” That wording is Deadline’s. Paramount has not published a statement that Smile 3 closes the series.

The picture at the top of this page is the Smile 2 trailer thumbnail. Use the Smile franchise page for both new pieces, or the horror genre page for other horror coverage.