In Hollywood, no horror franchise with any kind of name recognition stays dormant for very long, and as the series that effectively launched the slasher genre back in 1978, Halloween is no different. Luckily for fans, last year’s sequel/reboot hybrid from the unlikely duo of David Gordon Green and Danny McBride turned out to be a solid return to form for a franchise that has had a fair share of underwhelming installments, going on to earn over $250m at the box office in the wake of largely positive reviews.
Any successful horror movie is virtually guaranteed a sequel, but Halloween took it one step further and announced two follow-ups titled Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends, set to be released in 2020 and 2021, respectively. While it was originally rumored that the two entries would shoot back-to-back, the decision was made to film both Kills and Ends separately, with the former set to get in front of cameras this week in North Carolina.
Jamie Lee Curtis will once again headline the sequels as scream queen icon turned total badass Laurie Strode, with Michael Anthony Hall boarding the cast as the older version of original Halloween character Tommy Doyle alongside Kyle Richards, who will reprise her role as Lindsey Wallace for the first time in over 40 years.
One of the main problems with these kinds of legacy sequels in recent years has been an over-reliance on nostalgia, which the latest Halloween thankfully managed to avoid. Hopefully, the familiar faces in the cast have an important part to play in the story and aren’t simply being shoehorned in as Easter Eggs for longtime fans of the franchise. We’ll just have to find out for ourselves though when Halloween Kills hits theaters in October of next year.