“Happy Death Day” is back for one more kill, according to lead actress Jessica Rothe.
The “Boy Kills World” star told ScreenGeek that director Christopher Landon already has a third feature set to cap off the “Groundhog Day”-type horror trilogy. Rothe plays sorority sister Tree Gelbman who relives her own murder in the 2017 original film. That movie grossed $125 million at the global box office against a budget of $4.8 million. A 2019 sequel similarly did well, garnering $64 million against a budget of $9 million.
“Well, I can say Chris Landon has the whole thing figured out. We just need to wait for Blumhouse and Universal to get their ducks in a row,” Rothe said of a third installment. “But my fingers are so crossed. I think Tree deserves her third and final chapter to bring that incredible character and franchise to a close or a new beginning.”
Landon was set to direct the now-reworked “Scream 7.” He parted ways with the project following casting shake-ups. First, Melissa Barrera was fired due to comments about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Christopher Landon tweeted in a since-deleted post at the time, “Everything sucks. Stop yelling. This was not my decision to make.” Jenna Ortega later additionally exited.
Landon told IndieWire in 2023 that he pitched the “whole” third movie to Universal.
“I have a whole movie! It’s not even an idea. I pitched the entire movie to [Universal] and they loved it,” Landon said. “That was the funny part. They were like, oh my god, that’s so unexpected and so cool. It’s not dependent, it’s not set in the same day as the previous films, so it could be made now, or in two years or three years. It would still work. But the trickier thing too, and in fairness to them, it’s a bigger idea than the previous two films, so it would be a more expensive movie.”
He added that NBCUniversal’s streaming platform Peacock wanted some “Happy Death Day” for itself.
“They were like, oh, let’s make this an event for our streaming platform, which made a shit ton of sense to me, but then that kind of weirdly just vanished,” Landon said. “Jessica Rothe and I both have talked about it a lot publicly, how we both really want to do it. [Producer] Jason Blum has talked about it a lot as well. But I just think that it’s been very hard to get the studio to get excited about it. I get it, it’s a business and they’re doing what they do, but we’re all here and willing to do it.”
