MOVIE NEWS Who is responsible for the most chilling smile in film history? Opinions will certainly differ, but Jack Nicholson surely ranks high. In Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film, The Shining, he freezes the audience with his demonic grin. With a single image, he conveys the message: the character he plays, Jack Torrance, has completely lost his mind and is already looking for the fire axe to chop his son and wife to pieces.
The marketers of the campaign for Smile 2 might agree with this assessment, as the chain of associations in the developed strategy is clearly traceable. They asked the question: if Jack Nicholson’s son, Ray, is starring in a horror film where insanely smiling characters spill each other’s blood, what image should go on the production’s poster? The answer is obvious. Of course, we’ll put Ray on it, smiling just like his father in the classic The Shining. Of course, the photo needs a little tweaking, but that’s what Photoshop is for, and for everything else, there’s Ray Nicholson. And then there’s the text message on the poster, which is the film’s ominous tagline: “This will be the last thing you see.”
Fans are, of course, going crazy for the idea; one summed up their opinion: “pure madness, the smile demon himself is staring at us from this poster.”
The heroine of Smile 2 is a rising pop star (Naomi Scott), around whom characters with extremely peculiar expressions suddenly multiply and begin to fall, proving what the audience may already suspect: the curse of the smile demon is claiming victims again.
Thus smile Jack and Ray Nicholson, father and son, 44 years apart:
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