Halloween Ends Will Acknowledge COVID-19 and “Peculiar Politics”

Halloween Kills is finally being released in theaters this week after the pandemic delayed it for a whole year. The new movie will see the return of Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode and take place on the same night as the 2018 Halloween movie. Turns out, the delay of Halloween Kills is not the only way COVID-19 is affecting the franchise. The third installment to David Gordon Green’s new Halloween trilogy, Halloween Ends, is expected to acknowledge the pandemic. 

“Yeah. It jumps into a contemporary timeline,” Green recently told Uproxx. “So we go from two episodes that are the same night in 2018. And then we’ll get up to speed with … It’ll take place the time of its release…..So if you think about it, I mean, where we’re leaving these characters on Halloween 2018, the world is a different place. So not only do they have their immediate world affected by that trauma, having time to process that trauma – and that’s a specific and immediate traumatic event in the community of Haddonfield. But then they also had a worldwide pandemic and peculiar politics and another million things that turned their world upside down.”

Due to the pandemic, Halloween Kills will also be released this week on Peacock. It was recently revealed that producer Jason Blum was the one who decided to release the movie on the streaming service, but the creative is still hoping folks will check out the movie on the big screen. In fact, during a Q&A at a Halloween Kills screening at Beyond Fest, Blum explained why he’s never going to take going to the movies for granted again.

“I’ve never had the experience… I mean, have we… You never have either. Where you have a movie, it’s all ready to go, and then it doesn’t happen. And so you’re sitting on it and everyone on Twitter is like, ‘Where is Halloween?’ So it’s great for people finally are going to get to see it. And get to see it, obviously, here a couple more times, and then out in the world in a couple of weeks. So it feels fantastic. It feels great. It’s going to be appreciated the way it should be appreciated. I’m very glad that we waited. There was a big question of, ‘Should we wait or not wait?’ And I’m really glad that we did, yeah,” Blum explained.

He added, “It’s just, you really miss it. It’s something that I personally, definitely, took for granted. I used to, before COVID, I lived across the street from a movie theater, and the way I would see movies was always in this theater. And it’s just something that I definitely took for granted, but I never will for the rest of my life. I’m going to feel different about going to the movies for the rest of my life. Because it’s this special thing that I never thought of as special, I just assumed it would always take place. So in that sense, that’s kind of nice. And yeah, there’s nothing like showing a movie, in a movie theater with a lot of people. And especially scary movies. Horror movies, they’re just not as fun at home, it’s just not the same thing.”

How do you feel about Halloween Ends acknowledging the pandemic? Tell us in the comments.

Halloween Kills hits theaters and Peacock on October 15th. Halloween Ends is set to be released on October 14th, 2022.