David Gordon Green’s Halloween reboot made a ton of money, so much so that production company Blumhouse didn’t even wait a full year before announcing that Jamie Lee Curtis would be getting terrorized in two sequels to the film. The first of those, Halloween Kills, is coming later this year, and Blumhouse’s Jason Blum (he’s the guy whose house has the spooky stuff flying around) is already out there trying to build up hype with big promises about what to expect from Michael’s next romp through Haddonfield.
Speaking with Too Fab on the red carpet for Blumhouse’s Fantasy Island, Blum said that Halloween Kills is a “very big movie” (emphasis his, apparently), adding that the “canvas” of it is “very large.” That is literally a big promise, since he’s promising something big, but he offered a slightly meatier tease to our friends over at io9 recently. In an interview, he said that he and Green were concerned about what he calls “the Lord Of The Rings issue” when they first started developing these two sequels to the Halloween reboot, but those fears were assuaged by Halloween Kills. He says, unlike with The Lord Of The Rings where it felt like you weren’t getting a full story in some of the movies, Halloween Kills “feels like a complete movie” with a “first, second, and third act” as well as a “big end.” In other words, this movie isn’t all setup for the next movie.
The write-up on io9 points out that simply referring to this as the “Lord Of The Rings issue” is a mistake, since book readers knew going in that The Fellowship Of The Ring wouldn’t tell the entire story, but we think there’s a bigger issue here than whether or not the early movies in a trilogy will feel like worthwhile stories—Let’s call it the “Rise Of Skywalker issue.” See, people have been making first or middle installments in trilogies since trilogies were invented, and Marvel has made billions of dollars by constantly promising that the next movie is the big one, but the more obvious parallel here is Star Wars, not Lord Of The Rings. Blum doesn’t need to worry about whether or not people will like Halloween Kills, because he’s already making the third movie. He needs to worry about whether or not that third movie is going to be a bullshit waste of everyone’s time where the director tastelessly uses old footage to bring Donald Pleasence back to life and then walks back everything that happened in Halloween Kills.