John Carpenter, a bona fide horror legend and one of the central filmmakers in the Halloween movies, has commented on whether Halloween Ends will finish Michael Myers for good. Right now, that is the plan, but do these franchises ever truly end? None so far, anyway.
“Let me explain the movie business to you: if you take a dollar sign and attach it to anything, there will be somebody who wants to do a sequel. It will live. If the dollar sign is not big enough, no matter what, it will not live,” Carpenter told ComicBook about the future of Halloween post-Ends. “I don’t know, man. I don’t know. This time, I do not know. They really want to end. They’re going to shut it off, end it. It’s what David has in mind. That’s fine.”
Finality has been a theme of David Gordon Green’s Halloween ‘requel’ trilogy. Starting in Halloween (2018), he reset the timeline to make it a sequel to the original set 30 years later, with Jamie Lee Curtis as an older Laurie Strode who’s obsessed with the return of Michael Myers to Haddonfield. In Halloween Kills, Mike turns the town into a frenzied mob, and now we’re heading towards a definitive conclusion.
How long that lasts is anyone’s guess. The longest the Halloween franchise has gone without a new film is nine years, and that was between Rob Zombie’s Halloween 2 and Green’s partial reboot.
Perhaps this will be it, and Universal will step away from Michael and Haddonfield for good. The first half of Carpenter’s quote tends to be where Hollywood’s heart lies: if there’s money in more, we will get more. Carpenter is happy either way, as he tells The Hollywood Reporter: “It is also fabulous when I look up from my perch on my couch and a check arrives in the mail. I feel extremely happy.”
Long may it, and he, continue. Halloween Ends is in theatres October 14, 2022.