The Ending Of Child's Play Explained

He's back, he's short, and he's going to be your friend 'til the end if it kills you. Chucky returns in the remake/reboot Child's Play with the psychotic doll voiced this time by the guy famous for Jedi Knights and killer clowns — Mark Hamill. 

Directed by Lars Klevberg and written by Tyler Burton Smith, the new Child's Play is every bit the slasher flick you would want it to be, but in many ways manages to be very different from the original. In 1988's Child's Play, the killer "Good Guys" doll was possessed by the soul of serial killer Charles Lee Ray (Brad Dourif), but this time around there's no sorcery involved in the doll's insanity. Chucky is a "Buddi" doll produced by the Kaslan corporation. Possessing a degree of artificial intelligence and wifi capability to interact with other Kaslan products, the Chucky of the new Child's Play goes bad because a vengeful factory worker in Vietnam removes all of the doll's behavioral safeguards after his abusive boss fires him.  

Using the much more familiar avenue of technology to effect Chucky coming to life in all the wrong ways allows for Child's Play to do quite a bit more within the genre than you'd expect, while remaining bloody and darkly hilarious. It also goes a long way to explaining why the end of Child's Play is hardly the end of Chucky.

You could argue that the chief villain of Child's Play isn't Chucky, but Kaslan Industries — the corporation that produces the Buddi doll. Everything in Child's Play follows from the worker who releases one Buddi doll's safety protocols right before assembling it and subsequently throws himself from the roof of the factory. The doll shows up in Chicago's Zed-Mart, a replacement for the real life Walmart.

Child's Play has a little something to say about companies like Amazon and Apple who promote the idea of all of their products working together. The Buddi dolls are designed to control things like televisions, bluetooth speakers, and electronic thermostats as long as those products were also made by Kaslan. Most of the murders Chucky commits in Child's Play wouldn't be possible if his victims weren't surrounded by Kaslan stuff. When Chucky kills the creepy janitor Gabe (Trent Redekop), he does it by snatching control of Gabe's TV monitors, all of his lights, his thermostat, and even his vacuum cleaner. When he freaks out Andy in his apartment by speaking to him from a half dozen different spots around the living room, he can only do it because of all the Kaslan products in the room. Of course, there's also the Zed-Mart massacre at the end when Chucky uses all of the store's other Buddi dolls as well as a fleet of drones to murder dozens of shoppers.

The original Chucky was violent because he started off as a serial killer. But the new Chucky doesn't start off as a murderer. In order to learn how to be one, he learns from watching us. 

Shortly after Andy becomes friends with Falyn and Pugg, they all watch 1986's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 in Andy's living room. As the kids watch the carnage on the screen, Chucky notices how much they're laughing and how happy it makes them. Wanting to make Andy just as happy as the movie makes him, Chucky heads to the kitchen and comes back holding a knife. Andy stops him from hurting Pugg, but Chucky cuts Andy instead. The doll is genuinely confused afterwards. Watching Andy and Andy's other friends enjoy the violence so much, he could only imagine that some real violence would make them that much happier. 

It turns the old Child's Play dynamic on its head. In the original film, Karen Barclay (Catherine Hicks) gets Chucky as a gift for her son, thinking of it as nothing but a harmless toy when it actually holds the soul of a murderer. The Chucky of this new Child's Play isn't completely harmless to begin with, but he isn't a murderer until children unwittingly teach it how to be one.

We can feel confident by the end of Child's Play that Andy's not going to be a loner anymore. Falyn, Pugg, and Omar all rush to save him from the Zed-Mart massacre in spite of Andy having a fistfight with Omar earlier that Pugg got caught in the middle of. Child's Play shares producers Seth Grahame-Smith and David Katzenberg with 2017's It and the upcoming sequel It Chapter Two, and it's difficult to not be reminded of those stories when you see these four racing through Zed-Mart armed with mean-looking weapons — or later, when the four gather to utterly destroy Chucky's doll body with sledgehammers and bats. Like the kids in It, the ordeal has forged what promises to be a lifelong friendship. 

The scene toward the end when the four kids destroy Chucky's body — like a lot of things in Child's Play – brings to mind other films, but it's one of the few scenes that won't make you think of sci-fi flicks from the later '80s and early '90s. Instead, you'll likely remember Ron Livingston, David Herman, and Ajay Naidu murdering their hated fax machine in an empty field in 1999's Office Space.

One noteworthy absence from Child's Play is Andy's father. In the original 1988 film we learn that he died, but that's never spelled out in the remake. Shortly after Andy gets Chucky as a present, he shows the doll his sketchbook and unintentionally comes across a page where he keeps a picture of his father, mother, and himself. He quickly closes the book and it's the only time there's any mention of the father. We never hear a character speak his name and we don't know if he died, if he divorced Karen, or if he simply abandoned his family. 

Perhaps the filmmakers were simply counting on audiences seeing the original film and knowing that the father was dead, or there could be another reason. The fate of the father could be kept intentionally ambiguous because of plans for sequels. if Mike and Karen do end up a couple, maybe the father will return to disrupt their bliss. Or perhaps the father could have some more sinister role in a future installment. Regardless, it's curious that — besides the picture — he isn't mentioned in Child's Play at all.

Of course, like any bad guy in any slasher flick, we know Chucky's mortality is only limited by his profitability. If it makes financial sense to do so, he'll be brought back. After the smoke clears we get one last message from CEO Henry Kaslan (Tim Matheson), letting us know even though no Kaslan product could possibly be responsible for what happened at Chicago's Zed-Mart, as a precaution Kaslan is recalling all of their new Buddi 2 dolls, leaving Zed-Mart with the original Buddis. We see one of these Buddi dolls being shelved along with dozens of others and, predictably, its eyes glow red before going dark again, letting us know Chucky isn't quite gone.

So how could Chucky survive? Well, the Age of Ultron references gives us a clue. In that film the Avengers are warned every single robot body has to be destroyed in order to ensure Ultron's defeat, because otherwise Ultron could just transfer his consciousness into one of his drones. Likewise, we know Chucky was connected to Kaslan's cloud network during the Zed-Mart massacre — otherwise he couldn't have controlled all the other Buddi dolls or the drones. In all likelihood, as cathartic as it may have been, the kids' destruction of Chucky's body was probably a waste of time. Before he could be pounded into dust, Chucky sent himself into the cloud, and then just transferred to another creepy-looking doll body as soon as he could.