Last year’s Halloween, directed by David Gordon Green and produced and co-scored by John Carpenter, was one of the more pleasant surprises of 2018. Who would have thought that Danny McBride, the guy responsible for comedies like Your Highness and Eastbound & Down, in teaming with Green and screenwriter Jeff Fradley, would turn in such a fitting companion piece to Carpenter’s original? I sure was dubious, and I couldn’t have been happier to have been wrong. And with 2020 right around the corner, another outing is headed our way; and Laurie Strode herself, Jamie Lee Curtis looks to return as well.
Collider reports that Blumhouse is already prepping production on a new Halloween sequel (will it be called Halloween 2? We already have one of those, but we also already had a Halloween, so…). That the 2018 revisit of Laurie Strode’s ongoing struggle with Michael Myers took in $255 million worldwide while only costing $10 million to make, a sequel – regardless of how it ended, seemed like an all to obvious proposition. So here we are! Green has already penned the screenplay, and is expected to return to the director’s chair. There’s no word if McBride will return in a similar capacity, but Jeff Sneider’s report indicates that he’ll likely wind up in an Executive Producer role at the very least, along with Carpenter.
The other big detail here is that Curtis is indeed jumping back into the role of Laurie Strode, for the sixth time in this franchise’s history. Her recent portrayal was a very different, harder-edged take that was well received and had many critics reflecting on the role trauma played in film’s narrative. She’ll be making another bow here along with the other two generations of the Strode family that were introduced last time around (played by Judy Greer and Andi Matichak, also being courted to come back).
With news that this is being pushed into production starting during the Labor Day holiday, they’ll easily hit that October 2020 frame they’re surely aiming for, and as Sneider states, a likely Toronto International Film Festival debut ahead of that.
