David Gordon Green’s Halloween went down a storm back in September at the highly anticipated slasher sequel’s Toronto International Film Festival premiere, and it seems that the wider critical community was also quite pleased with Michael Myers’ new outing.
In fact, review-aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes declared this week that the Blumhouse production is officially Certified Fresh, which actually makes it the only Halloween sequel in the whole franchise to hold that honor. At the time of writing, the pic sits at an impressive score of 81% ‘Fresh’ reviews. To put this percentage into perspective, the 1978 original boasts a superior figure of 93%, but aside from that, the most critically acclaimed entry in the series was previously 1998’s Halloween H20, which has a middling 52%.
And though strong reviews don’t always ensure commercial success, David Gordon Green’s latest effort is off to a fantastic start at the box office. The numbers from Friday night are now in and Halloween sits at $33 million, putting in on the path to an $80 million opening weekend. Given that Venom just set the October record with $80.2 million, Michael Myers could very well pull ahead and take the crown from Eddie Brock.
These figures also place Halloween’s opening weekend above such R-rated horror hits as The Nun ($53 million) and Hannibal ($58 million), albeit still falling short of the current record-holder for this category, It ($123 million). Regardless, if the Blumhouse team hasn’t started work on a sequel already, they’ll no doubt do so very soon.
We’ll be back tomorrow to bring you the updated figures from the rest of the weekend but whether it ends up beating Venom or not, no one can deny that Halloween is a true return to form for the iconic horror franchise and signals a very bright future for Mr. Myers on the big screen.
