Does ‘Happy Death Day 2U’ Have a Post-Credits Scene?
The following post about Happy Death Day 2U credits scenes contains SPOILERS. Don’t read it unless you want to know them. Don’t yell at me if you read it. If you yell at me, I have another spoiler for you: I will ignore you.
If you thought there was no way to really resolve the endless time loop in Happy Death Day 2U, then congratulations: You understand the concept of movie franchises. Yes, while HDD2U gives its intrepid hero Tree (Jessica Rothe) a happy ending, returning her to her proper dimension and seemingly stopping her repeated birth(death)days, her story continues after the closing credits — setting up several possibilities for a Happy Death Day 3.
Tree and her intrepid team of weirdly overqualified college scientists are cleaning up the quad at Bayfield University, presumably as punishment for all the havoc they’ve wreaked on the school’s power supply. (Fun fact: It’s really the Loyola University campus.) Suddenly a black SUV pulls up and a bunch of guys in suits whisk them all away.
It turns out these men work for DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — which is a real part of the Department of Defense, by the way. DARPA has recovered the device that caused Tree’s time loop, which was created by Tree’s boyfriend’s roommate Ryan (Phi Vu). They are interested in the technology, but are having trouble figuring out how exactly it works. Having learned a lot about algorithms while she was trapped in the time loop, Tree offers to help. The DARPA guys say they also need a test subject to “trap” in a time loop on purpose. “I think I have the perfect recruit,” says Tree. Smash cut to Danielle (Rachel Matthews), her sorority frenemy, sitting up in bed and screaming, implying she’s now the one trapped in a time loop.
That creates the possibility that the inevitable third film could focus on Danielle at the center of a new time loop. That seems unlikely, because Tree (and Rothe’s awesome performance) has been so central to the previous two movies. On the other hand, snoody Danielle is basically in the same place Tree was before the first movie, which means she could go on a similar journey of personal growth slash dying over and over again. (Plus if Jessica Rothe doesn’t want to return for the next sequel, Keanu in Speed 2 style, you have a solid backup plan.)
Of course this could just be a one-off joke — or a deliberate red herring. Ryan’s quantum doohickey rarely works the way it should. In this movie, it goes on the fritz because of spam emails. It’s pretty easy to imagine a scenario where they try to trap Danielle in a time loop and accidentally send Tree back to her birthday for a third time. Or Carter gets sent back. Or they all begin looping through the same day, which could be kind of fun. There are a lot of possibilities here. As long as they involve someone dying over and over at the hands of a guy in a creepy baby mask, I’m down with whatever.
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