No horror franchise with even the slightest hint of earning potential is left on the sidelines for too long, unless it ends up embroiled in a complicated rights battle, which is the reason we’ve not seen Jason Voorhees murder his way through a new Friday the 13th for over a decade at this point.
Even lesser known titles and properties that on the surface held very little sequel potential have found themselves reinvented. Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever was remade just fourteen years after the original, while found footage phenomenon The Blair Witch Project spawned an entirely fictional and completely disastrous sequel just a year later, as well as a spiritual successor in 2016. The point is, horror is so malleable and consistently popular that the studios appear to operate under the assumption that if it worked once, it’ll work multiple times.
The unlikely creative duo of David Gordon Green and Danny McBride recently brought the ailing Halloween brand roaring back to the forefront of the genre with their critical and commercial smash hit, which completely disregarded canon to act as a direct follow-up to John Carpenter’s classic 1978 original.
After being pushed back an entire year, Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends will now arrive in October of this year and next respectively, at which point Green and McBride will presumably step away. However, insider Daniel Richtman claims that it won’t be the last we see of Michael Myers, with Universal and Blumhouse already reportedly looking towards the future and planning more films in the franchise.
Of course, this is hardly revelatory news when every major horror series is rebooted with almost alarming regularity, and the longest Halloween has ever been absent from our screens over the last 43 years is the nine years between Rob Zombie’s sequel and Green’s rejuvenation, so it wouldn’t be a surprise in the slightest to hear a new project is in development shortly after Halloween Ends is released.
