'Smile 2' has a brutal ending that blows the horror franchise's potential future wide open

• "Smile 2" has a memorable, absolutely bonkers ending.

• How it ends leaves the door open for the franchise to continue, as does its box-office success.

• The first movie was a box-office hit in 2022, and the sequel is tracking well too.

One of the most anticipated horror movies of the year is finally in theaters. And boy, does it live up to the hype.

"Smile 2" is the sequel to the 2022 film "Smile," which starred Sosie Bacon as a psychiatrist named Rose Cotter who finds herself the victim of a curse after witnessing a patient die by suicide.

That patient had previously watched another person die by suicide, and the film ultimately reveals that there's an unexplained supernatural entity haunting its victims by taking the form of various smiling people. The creature mentally and physically tortures its chosen victim for several days, before finally possessing the victim and forcing them to kill themselves in front of another person — who, in turn, becomes the next victim in the chain.

The first film was the feature debut of filmmaker Parker Finn, who returns as the writer-director of the sequel.

Here's what to know about the "Smile 2" plot, that wildly twisted third act and ending, and the future of the series.

Warning: Major spoilers ahead for "Smile 2," including the ending.

'Smile 2' has a new main character: pop star Skye Riley

"Smile 2" initially opens on a character we met in the first movie: Kyle Gallner's Joel, a police officer and Rose's ex-boyfriend who witnessed her death by self-immolation at the end of the 2022 film and thereby inherited the curse from her. It seems at first as though he'll be the person we're following in the sequel, but that's a misdirect.

In reality, Joel is only in the first few minutes of the movie, where we see him kill a drug dealer's lackey in an attempt to relieve himself of the curse by passing it on to another person (the first film established that the only loophole for escaping the Smile Entity involves killing another person yourself and making sure someone sees it). Things go sideways almost immediately, when Joel accidentally shoots and kills the drug dealer himself, then is run down and killed by a car when he flees the drug dealer's gang.

A new character, low-level drug dealer Lewis (Lukas Gage), is the unwitting recipient of the curse after he accidentally sees Joel kill both the dealer and his lackey when he's stopping by to pick up drugs. But Lewis, too, isn't long for this world; he's only the vehicle by which the entity's curse is passed on to our new leading lady — troubled pop star Skye Riley (Naomi Scott).

When we first meet her, Skye is a recovering drug addict. After a car crash left her badly injured and killed her boyfriend, actor Paul Hudson (played by Ray Nicholson, the son of Jack Nicholson), who was driving, she's preparing for her comeback world tour. Still in chronic pain but unable to get a doctor to prescribe her painkillers due to her past substance misuse, Skye turns to her former high school classmate Lewis to get Vicodin.

Lewis is on the tail end of the Smile Entity's curse when Skye arrives at his apartment. Strung out on coke and wildly paranoid after days of seeing the smiling creature, Lewis suddenly (and graphically) starts grinning at Skye before calmly smashing his own face open with a gym weight.

Though we don't see the entity onscreen, viewers who have seen the first movie recognize that Lewis was possessed, and has now passed the curse onto Skye. Now, Skye must deal with a literal demon on top of her metaphorical personal demons: specifically, the mental health problems that have led her to push away everyone close to her.

That includes her mom-manager Elizabeth (Rosemarie DeWitt), her sweet and well-intentioned assistant Joshua (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), and her ex-best friend Gemma (Dylan Gelula), who cut ties with Skye right before her near-fatal accident the year prior.

The 'Smile 2' ending features twists upon twists

Throughout the film, Skye contends with being haunted by the entity, which often takes the form of her overzealous fans (including one creeper from a meet-and-greet who attacked her). She gets support from her former friend Gemma, who surprisingly easily agrees to forgive Skye for her toxic behavior throughout their friendship when Skye reaches out for help in the early days of the curse.

Meanwhile, Skye is also receiving incessant text messages from a stranger who tells her that they know she was at Lewis' apartment the night he died. After a disastrous charity appearance leads to a meltdown when the entity takes the form of Skye's dead boyfriend, she finally agrees to meet with the texter and learns he's a potential ally: Morris (Peter Jacobson), an ER nurse, who tells her that his brother was also a victim of the Smile Entity further back in the chain.

Upon meeting, Morris tells Skye that he believes the only way they can stop the entity for good is to stop Skye's heart while she's alone in a room, temporarily killing her and thereby depriving the entity of a host to jump over to.

Initially, Skye is horrified by the suggestion. But things rapidly get even worse for her. Later, she returns to her apartment, where she's confronted by the entity, which has taken the form of a swarm of her fans. They attack her, and one reaches its hand into her mouth, apparently to possess her.

When Skye awakens, she's in a private rehab facility, being watched over by her mother and Joshua. Left alone, Skye and her mother have a confrontation where her mother rails against her for letting everyone down by asking to cancel the tour. Soon, Skye's mother is revealed to be the entity in disguise, which we see stab itself repeatedly with a broken shard of mirror.

Skye goes to flee before realizing she's covered in blood: It looks like she killed her own mother, despite Skye (and the audience) seeing the entity stab itself.

In a panic, Skye flees the hospital after a confrontation with Joshua, some doctors, and rehab security. She runs into Gemma, who was en route to the rehab facility to visit her, and steals an Uber driver's car at gunpoint to head to Staten Island; having run out of options and not wanting anyone else to die, she's agreed to meet Morris to enact his plan to stop her heart to defeat the entity.

Gemma hops in the car with Skye, insisting on sticking with her and saying she's her "ride or die." The heartwarming moment is cut short when the real Gemma calls Skye on the phone, revealing that the entity has been Gemma all along: Gemma never actually called Skye back or came to see her after Skye's initial voicemail apologizing for their falling out a year earlier.

The entity vanishes after taunting Skye by telling her that Gemma hates her, revealing that Skye, not Gemma, has been driving the car the whole time. Skye arrives at the abandoned Pizza Hut that Morris has rented out — its freezer, he says, will allow them to get her body temperature low enough to prevent brain damage while they stop her heart for nine minutes.

Morris sets everything up in the freezer, which conveniently has a door that will only open from the outside, then leaves to go "get something." At that point, Skye sees the version of herself critically injured after the car crash suspended from the ceiling: It's the Smile Entity, having taken the form of her past self.

The entity-as-past-Skye taunts Skye, telling her, "You'll never escape who you truly are on the inside." Skye fights off the creature and manages to get her hands on the injection to stop her own heart. This appears to work, as the entity shrieks — only to reveal it's yet another fakeout and none of this battle has really happened.

"You're not in control. I am," it says, before pushing Skye through a door that reveals she's actually on stage mid-performance on the opening night of her tour.

Skye's very much alive mom and Joshua are in the audience, appearing to suggest that it wasn't just the previous scene in the freezer that wasn't real but everything that happened at the private rehab facility too, including Skye's apparent murder of her mother.

A horrified Skye looks out on the massive, cheering crowd from the stage, then sees the entity (now appearing as a double of her current self in her concert outfit) in front of her. The double tears open its scar and the entity emerges from its corpse, climbing into Skye's mouth and possessing her.

The movie then cuts to the audience's perspective, where it appears that Skye is having a seizure onstage; the entity isn't visible to them. The concerned audience cheers when Skye recovers and gets up, a broad smile covering her face.

Having successfully possessed Skye, the entity forces Skye to kill herself on stage in front of thousands of fans. We don't actually see Skye kill herself, but the camera remains focused on the horrified reactions of the concert attendees watching it happen. In the final shot, we see Skye, lying dead on stage, with her glittering microphone stabbed through her eye. A literal mic drop.

What does this mean for 'Smile 3' and the franchise's future?

The first "Smile" movie was a box-office smash back in 2022, making over $217 million worldwide. Deadline even named it one of the year's most valuable blockbusters in terms of profit. It doesn't appear that was a one-off either; "Smile 2" is tracking well so far, topping the first film's debut with a $23 million opening. That all makes it hard to imagine Paramount wouldn't want to order more sequels if writer-director Parker Finn is game.

The ending of "Smile 2" cleverly opens up the world of the franchise so that future installments could go in any number of directions. Now that an arena full of fans have witnessed Skye's death at the hands of the entity (plus the millions more who probably watched it streaming), it could conceivably infect any, or all, of them, theoretically spreading its curse worldwide.

(And maybe wiping out humanity in the process? Who's to say!)

Finn also avoided a common genre pitfall: overly explaining the nature of your monster. Viewers end "Smile 2" just as clueless about the nature of this creature as they were at the end of the first movie. None of the characters have any idea what this thing is, or whether it has any weaknesses that would allow it to be defeated, and neither do we.

Hopefully, Finn will continue to remain at the helm of the franchise should it continue. He's already said he's got plans for a third movie lined up, though "Smile 3" hasn't been officially confirmed yet.

"There are some ideas that I think are very exciting. I think it's really fun to imagine a lineage of 'Smile' movies where each one becomes more off the rails than the previous one," Finn told SFX Magazine.

"Smile 2" is now in theaters.

Read the original article on Business Insider