The long-awaited Halloween is finally out this weekend, after years of anticipation. Late in 2017, there was talk about possibly filming two Halloween movies back to back, so there would be another sequel ready soon. The sequel was nixed so right now this is the only Halloween movie, and producer Malek Akkad barely remembers the sequel plans.
“I actually forgot about that,” Akkad said. “Yes, there was and it was a bit crazy. We didn’t have a script. David [Gordon Green] and his teams, we all could have done it but the idea was let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s see the audience appetite. Let’s see how we all work together. In terms of Trancas’s point of view, we went from having one distributor and now technically three. We have Miramax, Blumhouse and Universal. For everybody involved in this film it’s been a growing process. I think it probably would have been too ambitious to do and that’s I think where we ended up on it. To be completely frank, I forgot about that until right now. It’s been quite a year.”
Had they gone forward with a second film, the Halloween coming out now would still have been the same movie opening Friday. They were not going to save any of this film for a sequel.
“It was going to be a benefit to production and keep the actors and their schedules and the locations,” Akkad said. “It’s a benefit to cost and production but this film was always very much what this film is.”
Perhaps the idea to make two also came from the struggles to get just one made. If they had the green light, it was tempting to get a second film out of it, but Akkad ultimately decided to focus on the one.
“We did start many stops and starts with the previous studios we were with,” Akkad said. “Silly things that were stopping this and starting us and stopping us became very frustrating. This film’s been a nine year odyssey for me. When we finally did get out from that previous deal, we were able to look around and see who we wanted to partner with. We didn’t think we could do better than Blumhouse and Jason Blum.”
The Halloween franchise has enjoyed a strange continuity, where some sequels go together but some sets of sequels completely ignore the others. Even this one ignores Halloween II and H20 yet still stars Jamie Lee Curtis.
“Sort of just by happenstance, the chalkboard was wiped clean in a way that Rob [Zombie]’s chapter was over and now we were going to start again,” Akkad said. “I’ve thought long and hard about this very question many times in the franchise. The first probably being when we decided to do the remake with Rob Zombie and to some extent Resurrection. You can keep going back. The franchise has definitely taken some left turns and I’d be the first to admit there are some installments that are a little better than others. One thing that I’ve come to believe is that this franchise and these characters are bigger than any one installment and any one filmmaker. At least that’s panned out to be true so far. It did take a little getting used to that idea but looking back over the franchise and seeing we’ve taken a lot of these left turns that could be looked at as hard to explain or out of left field anyway. It wasn’t that difficult. After H2O, we brought Jamie back for Resurrection and Michael Myers came back. You can look at many of the different stops and starts.”
It makes the Halloween franchise unique. While Freddy, Jason and Chucky more or less follow a single continuity, Halloween has several different tangents.
“It goes back to these characters and franchises are bigger than any one installment,” Akkad said.
“It’s amazing, our fan base. We love them. We always try to do right by them, always try to expand the fan base. Certainly, there have been times we’ve perhaps disappointed them more than others and other times we’ve been more successful at giving them what they want. You also have to push the envelope a little bit with filmmakers and let them have their voice. It’s an interesting point to say it’s not a continual timeline.”
Halloween opens Friday, October 19.
