‘Smile 3’ Lands ‘Hellraiser’ Director David Bruckner and ‘Channel Zero’ Creator Nick Antosca: Everything We Know
The smile is getting a new face behind the camera. Paramount is moving forward with Smile 3 , and for the first time the franchise won't be directed by its creator. According to Variety, which broke the news on Wednesday, Oct. 28, David Bruckner, the filmmaker behind The Ritual , The Night House and Hulu's 2022 Hellraiser , will direct the third chapter from a script by Nick Antosca, the writer-showrunner behind Channel Zero , The Act and Apple's new Cape Fear series.
Parker Finn, who wrote and directed both Smile and Smile 2 , isn't walking away. He's staying on as a producer and reportedly pitched the framework the new film is built on, while he's busy directing Paramount's remake of Possession. Below we break down everything confirmed, who these two filmmakers are, how the first two films performed, why this handoff is smarter than it might look, and the questions still hanging over the most unsettling grin in modern horror.
Watch the Smile 2 trailer
There's no Smile 3 footage yet (cameras haven't rolled), so here's a refresher on where the curse left off: Paramount's official trailer for Smile 2.
The details: what's actually confirmed
Here's what the trade reporting has locked down so far:
- Director: David Bruckner.
- Writer: Nick Antosca, working from a pitch by Parker Finn.
- Producers: Parker Finn and Temple Hill Entertainment, the company that has produced the series since the start. Jonathan Fass is executive producer.
- Studio: Paramount Pictures, home of both previous films.
- Release date, cast, plot, budget: none announced.
That last line matters. Nobody has said whether Naomi Scott's pop star Skye Riley, Sosie Bacon's Dr. Rose Cotter or Kyle Gallner's cop Joel (the one actor besides Caitlin Stasey to appear in more than one entry so far) will be back. Several outlets are describing this as the film that completes a trilogy, but Paramount hasn't used that word officially, so treat it as framing rather than fact.
Who's behind it
David Bruckner, director
If you've been watching indie horror for the last 15 years, you've seen Bruckner's work even if you didn't clock his name. The Atlanta-raised filmmaker co-directed the 2007 indie The Signal , which earned an Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award nomination, then made one of the most talked-about segments in anthology horror: "Amateur Night" in 2012's V/H/S. It was popular enough to be spun into the feature Siren. He followed with "The Accident" in Southbound and has stayed in the V/H/S family as a producer and story contributor, directing the "Total Copy" wraparound in V/H/S/85.
His features are where the Smile fit really shows. The Ritual (2017), adapted from Adam Nevill's novel and released by Netflix, turned a hiking trip into folk-horror grief therapy. The Night House premiered at Sundance in January 2020 and, after pandemic delays, reached theaters via Searchlight on Aug. 20, 2021. Starring Rebecca Hall as a widow unraveling in her late husband's lakeside house, it holds an 88% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 68 on Metacritic, and earned about $15.5 million worldwide on a $12 million budget. Then came Hellraiser , the October 2022 Hulu Original reboot that cast Jamie Clayton as the first female Pinhead. It landed at 67% on Rotten Tomatoes and 55 on Metacritic, and a sequel was confirmed to be in the works with Bruckner in March 2024.
Reporting on the hire also lists a busy slate: a The Blob remake at Warner Bros., a Universal adaptation of The Caretaker starring Sydney Sweeney, and Mice at A24. Where Smile 3 lands in that queue is one of the bigger open questions.
Photo: Naomi Scott via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license).
Nick Antosca, writer
Antosca might be the more exciting half of this pairing. He created and ran Syfy's Channel Zero (2016-2018), the anthology that turned creepypasta like "Candle Cove" into some of the strangest horror TV of the decade. He co-wrote three episodes of Hannibal 's third season, co-created Hulu's The Act and Netflix's Brand New Cherry Flavor , created Peacock's A Friend of the Family , executive produced Syfy's Chucky , and this year created Apple TV's Cape Fear. On the film side, 2021's Antlers was based on his short story "The Quiet Boy," and he's credited on this year's Colleen Hoover adaptation Verity. He's also a Shirley Jackson Award winner, taking Best Novella in 2009 for Midnight Picnic.
The through line in his work is psychological rot: people whose minds, families and identities are being eaten from the inside. That's exactly what the Smile entity does.
Parker Finn, producer
Finn built this franchise from an 11-minute short, Laura Hasn't Slept , which played SXSW in March 2020 with Caitlin Stasey as a patient haunted by a grinning man. Paramount turned it into a feature, signed Finn to a first-look deal in March 2023, and announced Smile 2 at CinemaCon a month later. His company Bad Feeling is now producing his Possession remake, which stars Callum Turner and Margaret Qualley alongside Paul Dano, Diego Calva, Madeline Brewer, Emory Cohen and Nicholas Alexander Chavez, with Robert Pattinson among the producers. Paramount has it dated for June 11, 2027.
The backstory: a strange history, and an old connection
The Smile story nearly never happened in theaters. Paramount originally planned the first film for streaming, but strong test screenings pushed it to a theatrical release on Sept. 30, 2022. It opened at No. 1 with roughly $22.6 million domestic and was widely described as the highest-grossing original horror film of 2022. Smile 2 followed on Oct. 18, 2024, moving the curse from a therapist's office to a stadium tour, with Scott as Skye Riley, Lukas Gage, Rosemarie DeWitt and a Drew Barrymore cameo.
Talk of a third film started almost immediately. In September 2024 Finn said each entry could get more unhinged than the last, and by December 2024 reports had Smile 3 in development with a 2025 shoot in mind. That shoot didn't happen, and Finn's attention turned to Possession. The new hires explain the gap: Paramount has kept Finn's blueprint and handed the execution to two filmmakers with deep genre résumés.
Here's the fun footnote. Bruckner and Antosca have been paired by Paramount on a horror franchise before. Antosca was hired to write the studio's Friday the 13th reboot in 2014, Bruckner was set to direct, and the film was dated for May 13, 2016. Both left before production, with Bruckner's exit reported in late 2015, and that version never got made. A decade later, the same studio is betting on the same duo for a different killer brand.
By the numbers
- Smile (2022): $17 million budget, $105.9 million domestic, $217.4 million worldwide. 80% on Rotten Tomatoes, 68 on Metacritic, B- CinemaScore.
- Smile 2 (2024): $28 million budget, opened No. 1 with about $23 million, $69 million domestic, $138.1 million worldwide. 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, 67 on Metacritic, B CinemaScore.
- Franchise total: about $355.5 million worldwide on $45 million in combined production budgets.
The headline is that the sequel made roughly 36% less than the original worldwide while costing 65% more to produce, and it still earned nearly five times its budget. Critics actually liked it a bit more (86% vs. 80%), and audiences graded it higher. That's the profile of a franchise with a loyal core rather than a fading one: smaller, but very profitable.
Analysis: why this handoff makes sense
Losing the creator's hands on the camera is usually where horror franchises start to wobble. But the comparisons cut both ways. Insidious stayed healthy after James Wan stepped back to produce, with Leigh Whannell, Adam Robitel and Patrick Wilson taking turns in the director's chair. The Conjuring universe has thrived on handing spinoffs and sequels to new directors with Wan producing. The franchises that fell apart, think the later Paranormal Activity run, usually did so because the studio swapped in anonymous hired hands and a stale formula, not because the creator left.
This isn't that. Bruckner is a filmmaker with a distinct voice, and his best work is about the exact theme Smile runs on: trauma that follows you, warps your perception and won't let you trust your own mind. The Night House in particular, with its grief, its haunted perspective tricks and its dread of what's hiding in plain sight, plays like a cousin of the first Smile. He's also proven he can steer a legacy property without embarrassing it; Hellraiser wasn't a smash, but it was widely seen as the strongest entry the series had produced in decades.
Antosca brings something the series could use: an eye for how a horror premise plays across people and institutions. Finn's films have been tightly locked on one cursed protagonist each. Antosca's TV work is built on wider canvases, families, towns, true-crime ecosystems. If Paramount wants the third film to feel bigger without just being louder, that's the right instinct to hire.
The risk is the box office trend line. Smile 2 was more ambitious and better reviewed, yet it made less. A third entry needs a hook that brings back casual viewers, not just fans. The smart money is on Finn's framework doing what Smile 2 did with the pop tour: drop the curse into a fresh, very public pressure cooker. And with Finn's Possession landing in June 2027, Paramount suddenly has two horror tracks running off the same creative engine, which is the real strategy here.
What we still don't know
- When it shoots and opens. No production start or release date. Bruckner's slate is crowded, so the order of his projects matters.
- Who comes back. No word on Naomi Scott, Kyle Gallner or any returning character.
- What Finn's framework is. Finn has teased that the first two films barely scratched the surface of the entity's mythology, but no plot is public.
- Theatrical or streaming. The first two were big October theatrical plays, but nobody has said how Paramount will release this one.
The next confirmed date on this creative family's calendar is June 11, 2027, when Possession hits theaters. Expect casting news on Smile 3 to come first.
Bottom line
Smile 3 just got a director whose whole career is about minds coming apart and a writer who's spent a decade making TV that gets under your skin. With Finn still steering the story from the producer's chair, this is about as safe a handoff as a horror franchise gets. Now the curse has to pick its next host.
Who do you want to see haunted in Smile 3 : a brand-new victim, or should Naomi Scott's Skye Riley come back? Tell us on Facebook.
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Header photo: David Bruckner via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license), cropped with text added.
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