Happy Death Day Tree: Jessica Rothe Reveals Working Title for Long-Awaited Third Film
Tree Gelbman has been murdered, stabbed, blown up, poisoned and forced to live through the same birthday more times than anyone should reasonably be expected to tolerate. Seven years after we last saw her, however, Jessica Rothe still isn’t ready to let Tree’s story end. The actress has revealed that she and writer-director Christopher Landon are continuing to push for a third Happy Death Day, and they have already given their proposed sequel a wonderfully inevitable working title: Happy Death Day Tree.
Rothe revealed the title during a Reddit AMA on September 23 while promoting her new horror film Beware Boiúna. Asked about another Happy Death Day, she made it clear that the project hasn’t quietly disappeared into development hell. Rothe said that she and Landon intend to keep pushing to get the film made, adding that they have developed a story containing the mixture of scares, comedy and emotion that characterised Tree’s first two adventures. She then casually dropped the working title, Happy Death Day Tree, before asking the question everyone was already thinking: “Because how can we not?”
It would certainly be difficult to resist. After Happy Death Day 2U, the franchise has effectively spent seven years standing in front of an open goal marked “Tree”. More importantly, though, this isn’t simply Rothe expressing a vague desire to return. She has previously revealed that she and Landon have worked out the story for the third film, meaning there is a genuine creative plan for completing what they see as Tree’s trilogy. What they don’t currently have is a green light from Universal and Blumhouse, and Rothe’s latest comments indicate that remains the crucial hurdle. There is no production date, release date or confirmed cast at present.
The enthusiasm surrounding a third film is easier to understand when looking back at how unexpectedly well the original worked. Released in 2017, Happy Death Day took the time-loop concept most famously associated with Groundhog Day and dropped it into a campus slasher movie. Rothe’s Theresa “Tree” Gelbman wakes in the dorm room of Carter Davis, played by Israel Broussard, goes about her birthday and is eventually murdered by a killer wearing Bayfield University’s unsettling baby mascot mask. Instead of staying dead, Tree wakes up back at the beginning of the same morning and gradually realises that identifying her murderer may be the only way to escape the loop.
Christopher Landon directed from a screenplay by Scott Lobdell, but it was Rothe’s performance that gave the increasingly ridiculous deaths an emotional centre. Tree begins as a deliberately abrasive protagonist before repeatedly dying forces her to reconsider her relationships, behaviour and unresolved grief surrounding her mother. The combination of slasher mystery, comedy and character development proved enormously successful. Produced on a reported $4.8 million budget, Happy Death Day earned approximately $125.5 million worldwide.
That success inevitably produced 2019’s Happy Death Day 2U, but Landon didn’t simply make Tree solve another conventional murder mystery. The sequel went much further into science fiction, revealing an explanation for the loop involving Ryan Phan’s experimental quantum reactor and throwing Tree into an alternate dimension. That allowed the film to revisit familiar characters and situations while changing their relationships and circumstances, most importantly giving Tree an unexpected opportunity to see her mother alive again.
The result was stranger, more ambitious and considerably more interested in science-fiction comedy than straightforward slasher horror. It also expanded the mythology in a way that left plenty of possibilities for another instalment. Financially, however, the sequel experienced a significant drop from its predecessor. Happy Death Day 2U cost a reported $9 million and earned approximately $64.6 million worldwide. That was still several times its production budget, but only around half the worldwide gross achieved by the first film.
The ending also provided an obvious route forward. A mid-credits scene introduced DARPA into the increasingly complicated business surrounding the reactor and suggested that the time-loop technology could be deliberately reproduced, with Danielle selected as an unfortunate test subject. Whether Happy Death Day Tree would directly continue that thread hasn’t been confirmed, and Rothe and Landon have sensibly avoided revealing what their proposed third story actually contains.
What is clear is that neither of them has given up. Seven years is a long gap for a series that originally managed two films in less than eighteen months, but Tree Gelbman remains one of the more distinctive horror protagonists introduced during the 2010s. Rothe’s combination of comic timing, vulnerability and increasingly exhausted acceptance of being murdered over and over was always the franchise’s greatest weapon.
For now, Happy Death Day Tree remains a working title rather than a confirmed production. But the story exists, its star wants to return, Christopher Landon remains involved, and the pair are still actively trying to persuade the people holding the purse strings to let Tree wake up one more time.
Frankly, after waiting seven years, we’d even forgive them for calling it Happy Death Day 3.
