Happy Death Day 3 may be sidetracked by the pandemic, but director Christopher Landon is making it abundantly clear that it’s still on his docket, and he’s itching to get back to work. Thusly, Landon has revealed the film’s actual working title, its current status and a potentially game-changing plot detail.
Happy Death Day to Us is the working title for the threequel, as returning franchise-spanning director Landon reveals in an interview with Empire. The film franchise, a horror genre hybrid of sorts that puts an irreverent self-parodying spin on the Groundhog Day-esque concept of time-looping, became a surprise hit upon the arrival of 2017’s original Happy Death Day, which grossed $125.5 million worldwide off a microscopic $4.8 million budget. Yet, 2019 sequel Happy Death Day 2U wasn’t quite as impactful with $64.6 million worldwide against an upped $9 million budget, but still proved profitable, leaving sequel prospects on the table, especially with studio Blumhouse’s eponymous producer, Jason Blum, as a proponent. However, COVID temporarily halted any progress on that front. Indeed, as Landon explains of the third film’s status:
The film will, of course, continue a journey down an increasingly esoteric rabbit hole from 2017’s Happy Death Day, which followed the time-loop ordeal of quirky coed Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe), who keeps getting killed—in increasingly absurd ways—by an unknown masked assailant, only to wake up and relive the same day. 2019 sequel Happy Death Day 2U revealed that Tree’s ordeal was caused by an experimental quantum reactor, and built to a twist ending revealing elevated stakes involving government agency DARPA. With no substantive update on when production on Happy Death Day to Us will commence, Landon does provide fans a consolation prize of sorts with plot details, revealing of its timeframe:
As for the revealed working title, which he believes he’s free to divulge, as he puts it, “without pissing everybody off,” he points to the elephant in the proverbial room, namely that, “It does not have the ‘3’ in there!” Whether that aspect proves pertinent to the picture remains to be seen.
It will certainly be interesting to see how Happy Death Day to Us (or whatever title it ultimately brandishes,) takes shape. With the cliffhanger style ending for Happy Death Day 2U having teased secret government-accosted fates for Tree and cohorts Carter (Isreal Broussard), Ryan (Phi Vu), Samar (Suraj Sharma), and Dre (Sarah Yarkin), we could be in for an unapologetically wacky threequel that further flies in the face of its original horror designation as a standout piece of space-time-touting genre-satirical cinema.
