**Spoilers for Halloween (2018).**
Halloween‘s latest (4th?) continuity reboot has become a critical and box office success, having reached number one at the box office two weeks in a row and bringing in over $126 million, with a reported $10 million budget.
Naturally, with so much success, the conversation of a possible sequel is very much on the table, with Jamie Lee Curtis saying she would return if Dave Gordon Green came back, she told Empire magazine: “If David Gordon Green called me up and said let’s do another Halloween, I would do another Halloween. Because he did such a beautiful job creating this movie.”
That leads us to a question: “What are the pros of giving this rebooted franchise another sequel? What are the cons?
Giving us more Halloween would allow us to focus on the characters of Laurie, Karen, and Allyson, as they deal with the shared traumatic experiences of losing friends and family that night.
Since so much of this year’s movie focused on Laurie and her PTSD from that night, how would having “killed” Michael free of her of some of her pain, as the fresh wound of losing her husband affects Karen, and how would losing friends and her father impact Allyson? What would reintroducing Michael do to all of their minds? Would Allyson be the one to take over Laurie’s role, or would it be Karen? A lot of people wanted more for Judy Greer, who often gets small roles in movies, and I feel like audiences really want her to be more of a lead. The end of her character’s arc in this film has the potential for so many different outcomes.
We’d also get an opportunity to bring in a female cowriter to flesh out Karen and Allyson, who can come off as really stilted at times, upon rewatching. Likewise, some people will complain that not everything needs a female director, but considering that a lot of people feel that the female characters who aren’t Laurie are a bit underwritten, that certainly couldn’t hurt, either—especially if this trio of Strode women will continue leading the series.
That said, my biggest worry about a sequel is what it would do to the character of Michael Myers. A lot of the new film did a really good job of deconstructing the idea that Michael needs a purpose, instead turning him back into someone who is just driven to kill. Bringing Michael back to life brings up those questions again, and I don’t think we have any really good answers for them.
The thing about the Laurie/Michael connection is that, since Michael killed his own sister, it projects a sort of sororicidal impulse onto his actions. However, that has now been cut out of the story, so his compulsion to attack Laurie specifically is thrown back into question. Why her? There’s some virtue in trying to explore why Michael kills from a narrative perspective, but the question is “How does the movie choose to handle it?”
I’m not opposed to more Halloween movies as a fan of the originals, but I think that a part of me wishes that a successful spinoff movie like this could be made without having to essentially turn it into another franchise—wishful thinking these days I know, but in the era where everything gets a sequel, sometimes a standalone story is best.
What do you all think? Would you want to see a sequel to 2018’s Halloween?
(via Geek Tyrant, image: Ryan Green/ Universal Pictures)
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