Halloween Ends Writer Danny McBride Addresses Backlash to Controversial Sequel

It's been about six months since Halloween Ends was released, the latest attempt at a "final chapter" in the long running horror franchise. Almost immediately after the movie premiered however came the fervor from longtime fans, upset that the rug had been pulled out from under them with the sequel. Despite the marketing for Halloween Ends making sure to note the final showdown between Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie Strode and The Boogeyman himself Michael Myers, that was only a portion of the movie. Instead, a lot of its runtime was spent with an entirely new character, Corey Cunningham, who was positioned as a pseudo protégé for Myers and became a new kind of boogeyman for the town of Haddonfield.

Naturally, some fans were very upset about this. Less than a week after the film was released came a petition to "reshoot" the entire movie to meet fan demand. Speaking in a new interview with US Magazine, Halloween Ends co-writer Danny McBride (who worked on all three of the movies in the new trilogy), opened up about the response to the film, calling it "valid criticism."

"I think that is a valid criticism," McBride told Us. "All three of these movies was really David Green's sort of brainchild. He had a very distinct idea of what he wanted to do with this. And I just felt lucky that he brought me along for the ride to help him where I could and to try to give him anything I could on it. And when he told me his pitch for focusing on this Corey character, I thought that it was cool. I thought it was a smart take on it. I thought that it was a way to avoid repetition and sort of explore something a little different and still tying it into what Halloween's ultimately about."  

McBride went on to reflect on his time with all three of the movies, having written and executive produced Halloween (2018), Halloween Kills, and Halloween Ends. In the end, he seems happy to have gotten to play in that sandbox for as long as he did.

"I'm a massive Halloween fan as well so you just want to give something that would make the fans excited and not make the fans angry with you. It was fun to try to pull that off for better or worse, and to get to meet John Carpenter and Jamie Lee Curtis. It was kind of surreal to be participating in furthering that story. It was awesome," McBride added "I've always tried to just pick things that keep me excited creatively or put me to work with people that I admire or have wanted to work with. And ultimately, is the project something that I would want to see myself [in]."

Ever since Halloween Ends there's been no talk of what will come next for the franchise. Considering the finality that it carried however then another reboot seems all but guaranteed. We're also just five years away from the 50th anniversary of the first movie, so the likelihood of a new film at that time seems inevitable.