‘Heart Eyes 2’ moves up its release date as Olivia Holt reprises role in slasher sequel
Paramount has moved ‘Heart Eyes 2’ up on its calendar, with the sequel now set to open on February 4, 2028, as reported by Deadline. The new date comes after the studio originally announced the film for a February 11, 2028, release in April. The sequel’s new date will put it in competition at the box office with Universal’s ‘Murder,’ ‘She Wrote,’ as opposed to a Disney event film, due to open the following weekend on February 11. Olivia Holt is returning to reprise her role as Ally McCabe, as Josh Ruben returns to direct from a screenplay by himself and Darcy Fowler. The film is based on a story by Christopher Landon and Michael Kennedy, who directed the original film. It is produced by Landon’s Divide/Conquer banner, with the sequel again being a Spyglass Pictures and Paramount Pictures production.
In the first ‘Heart Eyes,’ Ally and her coworker Jay Simmonds (Mason Gooding) are mistaken for a couple and become the next targets of the Heart Eyes Killer, a masked murderer who stalks couples every Valentine’s Day. The two lead characters battle the killer, survive, and end the film with a prank phone call as a setup for a potential sequel. The loose ending lets the creators of ‘Heart Eyes 2’ determine the story’s direction. The first film hit the theaters in February 2025 under Sony’s distribution and earned $33 million worldwide on an $18 million budget. It had an unprecedented second-weekend gross, which is a hallmark of a successful slasher franchise, and Paramount seemed to have enough motivation to launch a sequel.
Ruben has expressed his desire for the franchise to continue to expand. He told Variety last year that the Heart Eyes Killer could be integrated into the framework of any great romantic comedy and would still land. “I’ll put it this way: You could replicate the structure of any great rom-com, from ‘His Girl Friday’ to ‘Defending Your Life,’ and you could drop Heart Eyes into the center of that story, and have him flash and slash about. That’s what’s exciting about this: There’s an opportunity that we could have whoever the filmmaker was — certainly, I’d be interested — genuinely trying to create or replicate that rom-com, or the feeling of a ‘Bridget Jones’ or ‘Love Actually’ or what have you, but actually have those people terrified by this psychopathic killer,” he said.
Meanwhile, Paramount announced the new date alongside another release-schedule update, placing Alexandre Aja’s ‘Crawl 2’ on July 16, 2027. While that’s a separate franchise, it suggests Paramount and Spyglass plan to keep mining genre sequels through 2027 and 2028. For ‘Heart Eyes 2,’ fans have a returning lead, a returning director, and a release date that’s a week closer than originally projected. What they don’t have is any information on Mason Gooding’s Jay, or what form the Heart Eyes Killer’s next obsession will take.
