Smile Watch Order and Ending Explained: The Entity, Rose and Skye

Watch Smile (2022), then Smile 2 (2024). That is both release order and story order. Parker Finn’s short Laura Hasn’t Slept (2020) is optional prologue, not a required first chapter. Smile 3 has a director and a writer as of October 28, 2026, and no release date.

The sections before the spoiler headings stay at setup level. The entity rules and the two endings are below those headings on purpose. The October 28 hiring is covered in the Smile 3 news report. This page is the order and the endings.

The order that matches the story

Streaming lineups change by country and by month. This guide does not assign a current subscription service. The Blu-ray editions below are specific discs checked on Amazon.com.

What you can know before the endings

Smile follows Rose, a therapist in a psychiatric ward, after a patient, Laura Weaver, kills herself in front of her while smiling. Rose starts seeing smiles other people do not see. The official shape of the film, including the Paramount logline, is that she has to face something she cannot explain, tied to her own past. That is the premise. The outcome is in the spoiler section.

Smile 2 follows global pop star Skye Riley as she prepares a comeback tour and starts seeing the same kind of smile. The sequel’s opening uses Joel, the detective from the first film. You can follow Skye’s week without a recap, and you will still feel the missing piece if you skipped Rose.

Finn has said, in interviews Wikipedia cites from late 2022, that he left parts of the first film unresolved on purpose and wanted any sequel to keep the entity’s mystery. Smile 2 adds a new host and a new theory about how to break the chain. It does not publish an origin story for the thing doing the smiling.

What Smile 3 has actually added

On October 28, 2026, Variety, Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter reported the Bruckner and Antosca hire. Finn pitched the framework and remains a producer. Variety’s grosses in that story put Smile at $105 million domestically and $217 million worldwide, and Smile 2 at $69 million domestically and $139 million worldwide on a $28 million budget, with the series past $350 million worldwide. Wikipedia lists $217.4 million and $138.1 million. Use those as trade and reference figures, not as a new studio statement from October 28.

Bruckner also directed The Ritual. That film is a separate story, covered in our review. His other reported projects, including a Blob reboot, The Caretaker and Mice, are not Smile films.

Deadline’s phrase “trilogy-completing” is the outlet’s description of the pitched framework. Paramount has not said the third film is the last one, and it has not said the story grows to a crowd, a new city or a named survivor. THR quotes Finn, from after Smile 2, hoping later films could go “bigger and more off the rails” while staying human. That interview is not a Smile 3 synopsis.

Spoilers: the rules the films actually show

Everything from here spoils Smile and Smile 2.

The entity, as the characters encounter it, appears as smiling people only the cursed person can see. It feeds on trauma. The chain moves when the host dies by suicide in front of a witness. The witness inherits it. The first film’s casework, done by Rose and Joel, finds people who witnessed a smiling suicide and then did the same within about a week. Smile 2 has the nurse Morris tell Skye that nobody he has tracked survived longer than a week. Treat “about a week” as the pattern the films’ investigators describe, not as a timer Paramount has defined outside the story.

One man, Robert Talley, tells Rose he escaped by killing someone else in front of a witness, passing the trauma on that way. The film presents that as his account. Rose later tries to kill a patient in front of her boss and discovers the attempt was a hallucination. Talley’s method is not a procedure the audience watches succeed.

Morris, in Smile 2, offers a different theory: the entity is a parasite that dies if the host’s body dies, so stopping Skye’s heart and restarting it might kill it without a witness. She refuses at first. The film then stages that plan and pulls the floor out. The theory is not shown working.

Smile ending

Rose isolates herself in her abandoned childhood home, believing distance will keep her from passing the curse on. The entity appears as her mother. Rose had watched her mother die of an overdose and had been too afraid to intervene. She seems to burn the entity and escape. She does not. Joel finds her outside the house. She runs back in. The entity shows a skinless form with several smiling mouths, forces itself into her, and she sets herself on fire while smiling at Joel.

Joel watches. Under the rule the film has spent two hours demonstrating, the curse moves to him. Rose’s apparent victory was another vision. Wikipedia’s plot summary is the account this paragraph follows.

The short’s relationship to that chain: Wikipedia describes Laura Hasn’t Slept as Laura telling a therapist about a smiling pursuer, then realizing the therapist is the entity. The short seems to kill her. The feature reopens with Laura still alive, seeking Rose, which the same Wikipedia account reads as the short’s ending having been another hallucination. Laura’s death in front of Rose is the handoff that starts the feature. You do not need the short to see that handoff. The feature plays it.

Smile 2 ending

Six days after Rose’s death, Joel tries Talley’s method. He means to kill one criminal in front of another. The shootout kills the intended witness. Drug dealer Lewis Fregoli, whom Joel had not seen, watches and inherits the curse. Joel is then hit and killed by a truck.

Skye, recovering from a car crash that killed her boyfriend Paul Hudson and from a public substance-abuse crisis, goes to Lewis for Vicodin. Lewis smashes his own face in with a weight plate while smiling. Skye watches and leaves without calling anyone. The curse is hers.

Her week is a run of smiles wearing Paul, her assistant Joshua, a ruined Lewis, and her backup dancers. She reconnects with her estranged friend Gemma. Morris texts her. He has been tracking the entity since it killed his brother. He explains the chain and the heart-stop idea. She walks out when people in the bar recognize her.

A later stretch shows her mother and manager, Elizabeth, stabbing herself, then shows Skye holding the weapon. Skye flees with someone she thinks is Gemma, learns the real Gemma is on the phone, and meets Morris at an abandoned Pizza Hut so a walk-in freezer can limit the damage of a stopped heart. The entity appears as Skye’s injured self. She injects the syringe. The entity tells her she is not in control.

She is then on stage for the tour opening at Herald Square Garden, the venue name in Wikipedia’s plot summary. Elizabeth is alive in the audience. The day of the retreat, the car and the freezer was an illusion. The entity tears out of a copy of Skye as the same kind of many-mouthed form Rose saw, possesses her, and she stabs herself through the eye with her microphone in front of thousands of people.

That last image is the sequel’s ending, not a press release for Smile 3. The first film’s rule says a witness of a smiling suicide inherits the curse. A packed arena is full of witnesses. Applying the rule to that crowd is a reading of the shot. It is not a published premise, cast or set piece for Bruckner’s film. Morris’s heart-stop plan is also unresolved: the version the audience watched was inside the illusion, so the film never shows the outcome of a real attempt.

Wikipedia’s Smile 2 page, citing Joey Nolfi’s October 19, 2024 Entertainment Weekly interview, quotes Finn on that ending. He wanted a moment “where the audience in the arena is staring through the screen at the audience in the movie theater,” and he asked whether “coming back for a Smile 2” had done this to Skye. That is his reading of his own ending, as Wikipedia records the interview. It is still not a Smile 3 outline.

What to watch if you only have one evening

Watch Smile if you want the rule stated cleanly, through one doctor and one chain of police files. Watch Smile 2 second if you want to see that rule hit a public stage. Skip the short unless you like seeing the seed Finn grew. Skip any rumor about who Bruckner will cast until a trade or the studio names someone.

For a horror starting point that is not this series, the beginner horror guide is a different list. Both new Smile pieces sit on the Smile franchise page.