Photo: New Line Cinema
The A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise hasn’t had it as bad as Friday the 13th but it feels like a shame we haven’t seen Freddy Krueger on screen since 2010. The franchise is a $457 million worldwide earner and the key difference is that New Line Cinema has always been proud of these films. The studio wasn’t referred to as “the house that Freddy built” just for shits and giggles. The franchise helped shape them in their early days and they were fully aware of it.
The A Nightmare Elm Street remake saw a similar issue that the Friday the 13th remake went through. Things started off well in the beginning when the remake earned an impressive $15 million on opening night & $32.9 million on its opening weekend. This is a solid opening for any film, but especially one in the horror genre.
Things took a turn in week 2 when A Nightmare on Elm Street dropped 72 percent in its second weekend, earning $9,119,389. It still placed second for the weekend but it was a very harsh drop and it continued to have steep declines until topped out at $63 million on a $35 million budget. This isn’t a poor showing but it’s another sign of people not being satisfied with the finished product. The so-so box office and tepid critical response (15% rotten on Rotten Tomatoes) seemed to kill sequel talks almost immediately. It was announced that there wasn’t much interest in doing a sequel to the remake and plans to reboot the franchise have been mostly murmurs since the release of the last film in 2010.
Photo: Compass International
The Halloween franchise had better luck when it got the remake treatment which seemed to reignite interest in the series again, despite the polarizing response from fans. The franchise is another huge earner with $366 million from worldwide grosses and in 2007 Rob Zombie took on the daunting task of remaking the John Carpenter classic. I’m not a huge fan of his take on Michael Myers but Zombie has hardcore fans and some responded fondly to his more extreme approach to the Halloween mythos.
Halloween grossed $10.8 million on its opening day and went on to gross $30,591,759 over the four-day Labor Day weekend. At the time, it was the biggest opening weekend ever for that particular holiday. Despite a 63.9% decrease in week 2, Dimension Films were happy enough with the results which eventually led to a total gross of $58 million and north of $80 million worldwide on a $15 million budget.
The Halloween remake did with the other two in the big three couldn’t and that was actually generate a sequel. Halloween II was released in 2009 but the sequel would put a nail in the franchise for years due to an extremely poor critical reception. Rob Zombie returned to direct the sequel but this film was more his vision and it was clearly far removed from what fans have come to expect from the franchise.
The sequel opened lower than the previous film with $16.3 million but it dropped 64% in weekend two and was out of the top ten by its third weekend. It grossed $33.3 million on a $15 million budget but it left a bad taste in the mouths of many and made the franchise go dormant.
Talks of a new Halloween film began in 2011. On June 21, 2011, it was announced that a new Halloween film, at the time titled Halloween 3D, would be released on October 26, 2012. At the time of the announcement, there was no director or writer attached to the project. Originally, Patrick Lussier and Todd Farmer were labeled as writers but dropped out due to their involvement with the Hellraiser reboot (another series that also seems dead). The film was dropped from the release schedule on October 26, 2012, as no work had progressed on the film.
It wasn’t until 2015 that we would get more news on a future Halloween film. In February 2015, it was reported that Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan would be writing a new Halloween film, along with Malek Akkad and Matt Stein producing. On June 15, 2015, it was further reported that The Weinstein Company was moving ahead with another Halloween sequel, tentatively titled Halloween Returns with Dunstan directing. The film would’ve been a standalone film set to reintroduce audiences to Michael Myers years after his initial rampage. It would pit a new group of Haddonfield youngsters against Myers.
Fans were soon to hit another snag with the project after receiving the promising news of a new film. On October 22, 2015, producer Malek Akkad expressed his wishes to postpone production for the new Halloween film insisting that the next iteration and extra time would result in a better film. Malek Akkad said:
“Although, I have to say, and this is somewhat new news, but unfortunately things happen in Hollywood where you have issues with studios and different variables. We’ve had to take a step back and now we’re trying to re-figure this beast that is the new Halloween. So there is a bit of a delay, But this new Halloween isn’t going to be quite what has been announced and what people are expecting, so we’re making some changes there as well.”
In December 2015, it was announced that Dimension Films no longer had the rights to the Halloween franchise and the cancellation of the planned film Halloween Returns was confirmed at the same time. Some believed that the first half of this news was good because, even though it left Halloween without a home, it meant that a studio willing to invest itself in the franchise could pick it up.
Huge Halloween news was gifted to fans in 2016 when it was reported that Miramax and Blumhouse Productions were developing a new Halloween film, which they would co-finance. John Carpenter was set to executive produce the project and act as creative consultant. After this huge news was announced, we heard murmurs of start dates and then talks that a story hadn’t been found which made fans think they were pulling our chain yet again but yesterday John Carpenter announced that the new Halloween film would be released on October 19, 2018, and is going to be written by David Gordon Green and Danny McBride. It would be directed by Green. This news feels solid and it looks like things will finally move full steam ahead on a new film.
That being said, I’m so jaded hearing about development news for the three horror franchises I grew up on. I get my hopes up with every announcement only to see them dashed. Some wonder why more installments are needed since we have so many already but I think these heavyweights of horror deserve to endure. It helps a new generation discover them and it allows the older films to remain relevant. In the movies they never seem to die but in real life, it’s looking pretty dire that some of them will come back to life.
