It’s been a certainty since about nine seconds after the first box office receipts started rolling in that Blumhouse would soon be working on a sequel to Halloween, David Gordon Green and Danny McBride’s updated take on John Carpenter’s slasher-spawning franchise. Regardless of your feelings on how well Green’s film plays with or recreates the feeling of Carpenter’s original, it undoubtedly did what a good October-based slasher film is supposed to do: Make its studio a ton of money, without costing very much of the stuff itself.
So it’s not precisely shocking to hear that McBride is already developing ideas for a follow-up to the film, which is the first truly mainstream success of a career that’s mostly been dotted with low-key but beloved comedy success. “ This is all new,” McBride told Deadline in an interview today. “We’ve never really had anything that worked, before.” (R.I.P. Vice Principals.)
As to that sequel:
We definitely have ideas of what we would do. I think we did not allow ourselves to really indulge those ideas until the movie came out. We just wanted to put all our hopes and dreams in having this film stick the landing. But we do have thoughts and ideas of what we could possibly do. We hadn’t invested a ton of time on them, but now we’re being asked to figure it out.
In contrast, nothing about Green’s initial revival project was a sure thing; McBride talks about how he and the rest of the team quickly realized the movie wouldn’t work without Jamie Lee Curtis, whose return to the franchise wasn’t even remotely guaranteed. Luckily for them, their script quickly brought her (and Carpenter, who provided advice and a score) into the fold, and the rest is money-making history, ensuring that any sequel concept they develop is almost certain to get a green light.
Still, as a great (if not millions-at-the-box-office beloved) man once said: “The immature man revels in such adulations. The mature man, however, celebrates not, because he knows that every victory is just a precursor to another fucked-up test.”