‘Smile 2’ Breaks Box Office Ground Despite Streaming Release

Tuesday, December 3 brought around the much-anticipated streaming release of Parker Finn‘s Smile 2, one of the year’s standout horror hits. However, despite this streaming release and having been available on VOD for some time, Smile 2‘s momentum at the global box office continues. The sequel’s latest achievement might just be its biggest yet, having now officially entered the top 75 horror movies of all time at the global box office.

75 might not seem like a large number at first, but, considering the incredible amount of big-budget horrors to have been released in this century alone, it’s certainly an achievement worth celebrating. Thanks to a global haul of over $135 million, Smile 2 has surpassed many big-name horror flicks to enter this prestigious list, including the likes of 2023’s The Exorcist: Believer, Saw IV, Halloween Kills, and another 2024 horror rival in Longlegs.

‘Smile 2’ is a Stomach-Churning Horror Ride

After the bold, eye-widening horror of the first installment, Finn decided to turn the dial up to eleven for his sequel, with Smile 2 being up there with Terrifier 3 as one of the most gruesome mainstream flicks of the year. Featuring plenty of heartstopping scares from bloody gore to violent frights, Smile 2 has set to standard for the future of the franchise, with any further editions having to match the palpably stomach-churning energy of this sequel. One such scene to leave many in the audience frozen in terror features Lukas Gage’s Lewis staring at Naomi Scott’s Skye Riley with a customary terrifying grin on his face, before bludgeoning himself to a violent death with a weight plate. This wasn’t just one of the most violent scenes of 2024, it is also one of Finn’s most violent, with the director saying in an interview with Collider’s Perri Nemiroff:

“I will say that for me, I feel that what I did to the Lewis character, played by Lukas Gage, is certainly
one of the most violent things I’ve ever done
to a character. I knew that that was always going to be a bit of a parallel echo to the Laura character played by
Caitlin Stasey
in the first film. Caitlin uses this piece of broken pottery that’s very sharp, right? There’s a lot of slicing going on, and I was like, ‘I wanna go in the complete opposite direction with this. I wanna find the heaviest, bluntest, just worst thing you could hit yourself with.’ And I love this idea that Lewis’ character, when he is hitting himself with that,
he sort of creates this game of peek-a-boo
, where every time he hits himself, we have to wait to see how bad the damage is, the new damage that he’s done.”

Smile 2 is now available to stream on Paramount+.