Jessica Rothe says the story for a third Happy Death Day is finished. The money is not.
Speaking to Deadline at the trade’s TIFF Studio while promoting her new slasher River, Rothe said she and director Christopher Landon sat down together and worked the entire film out.
So, Chris Landon and I have actually broken the whole story, which was really fun. We went to an undisclosed location, a Le Pain Quotidien in between our houses, and sat there for hours and broke the third movie. And now, we’re just waiting for Universal and Blumhouse to [give us] just a little money.
Jessica Rothe, to Deadline at TIFF
A Story Is Not a Green Light
Breaking a story is screenwriter shorthand for the part before the writing. The beats exist, the structure holds, the ending is decided. What it is not is a screenplay, a budget, a start date or a green light.
Rothe named the remaining obstacle plainly, and it is the same obstacle it has been since 2019. Neither Universal nor Blumhouse has publicly commented on a third film.
This is also not the first public flicker. In April 2025, at an American Cinematheque double feature of the first two films, Rothe and Landon both told the room that a third movie was moving forward. Seventeen months later, the movie has a story and still no financing, which is a fair measure of how these things actually move.
The Math Both Studios Already Have
Happy Death Day cost roughly $4.8 million in 2017 and opened to $26 million domestic on its way to $125.5 million worldwide. Happy Death Day 2U cost about $9 million and finished with $64.6 million. Under $14 million of production spend, roughly $190 million back.
The honest counterweight is that the sequel took roughly half what the original did, and a franchise whose second chapter halves is not an automatic third chapter. Landon has pointed at that himself in past interviews, saying the sequel did not build the momentum the studio wanted in order to justify a third film.
Still, studios have greenlit far more expensive things on far worse arithmetic, which is what makes the phrase just a little money land the way it does.
The Director Has Not Been Idle
Landon directed both films and wrote the second one himself, which is why the loop mythology went somewhere strange instead of simply repeating. He has kept working in the neighborhood since, with Freaky in 2020 and Drop in 2025, and the Blumhouse relationship has never lapsed.
That matters more than it sounds. Franchise revivals usually stall because the original filmmaker moved on and the star aged out of the part. Here, both are on record wanting it, and by Rothe’s account the two of them have already worked out what it is.
Where Rothe Is Right Now
Rothe was in Toronto for River, Joshua Giuliano’s debut slasher, which opened the Midnight Madness programme. She plays one of two estranged sisters opposite Jane Levy, which puts two of the genre’s most durable final girls in the same boat for ninety-two minutes. It screens next at Fantastic Fest in Austin, September 17 through 24.
Tree Gelbman has died more times on screen than most slasher villains manage to kill anybody. Whether she gets to do it a third time is now a budget meeting, not a creative one.
There is no script, no start date and no announcement from either studio. There is a story, two people who want to tell it, and a very specific bakery.
