It’s been five years since Happy Death Day 2U defied expectations and proved that you can get a lot of mileage out of “What if Groundhog Day was a slasher?” The first Happy Death Day was a clever, self-contained slasher, but the second managed to twist its time-loop premise into a wild sci-fi comedy with infinite potential. But sadly, that potential has never been realized, as hopes for a third Happy Death Day movie have steadily dried up.
“Will it ever happen? I don't know,” Christopher Landon tells Inverse at New York Comic-Con 2024. “I wish I had the answer.”
It’s not a definite “no” as Landon has said in the past, but it still doesn’t instill much confidence in fans who want to see the continued adventure of Tree (Jessica Rothe) and her very bad, no good day. But there’s a silver lining: Landon tells us that if Happy Death Day 3 is well and truly dead, he’ll release his initial treatment for the movie.
“I can promise that if it never happens, I will just put out the treatment I wrote, so everybody can just read what was going to happen,” he says.
When asked whether he could spoil what the treatment was about, Landon went back to being tight-lipped. “What if we’d make it, then I'd ruin it for everybody!” However, he says it’s “a bigger movie than the previous two. And it was a very cool idea.”
This matches with Landon’s previous descriptions of his plans for Happy Death Day 3, which he had described as “an epic apocalyptic adventure with still elements of horror.” It’s the kind of genre-leaping we’d expect of Landon — where else to take Happy Death Day but to the apocalypse?
In the meantime, Landon’s next movie with Blumhouse is an intriguing techno-thriller called Drop, which stars Meghann Fahy as a woman on a date who finds herself terrorized by a series of anonymous images that get Air Dropped to her phone and threaten to hurt her family if she doesn’t do something unspeakable.
The trailer shown to NYCC attendees teased a much more straightforward, one-location thriller than Landon’s previous films, but Landon says Drop wasn’t without its influences.
“We talked about directors that were undeniably a huge inspiration, and Wes Craven is obviously at the very top there,” he reveals. “And Brian De Palma. That was definitely there in the back of my mind while I was making the film.”
