After 20 Years, 'Halloween' Needs a New Home

Since 1995, Dimension Films has owned the rights to the Halloween franchise. They've brought us Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995), Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998), Halloween: Ressurection (2002), as well as Rob Zombie's remake, Halloween (2007) and it's sequel, Halloween II (2009).

In a bit of an end of the year shocker though, news broke Monday that the company no longer has the rights to the franchise that began with John Carpenter's original classic in 1978. It seems they forgot to check the fine print on the contract since they haven't produced an entry in soon-to-be seven years.

A new film had been in-development - rumored to be called Halloween Returns which would have been a direct sequel to the original - but that project has now been scrapped. Longtime franchise producer Malek Akkad (son of Moustapha Akkad, who produced all the Halloween films until his death in 2005), will remain onboard.

The rights are now being shopped out to find a new distributor and don't be surprised to hear Warner Bros. and/or Paramount kicking the tires on this one. Warner Bros. (which houses New Line) once owned the rights to Friday the 13th but sent them to Paramount in exchange for a split domestic distribution of Christopher Nolan's Interstellar (I know, what?). If the rights to Halloween end up at either of those studios, I'd be hard pressed to imagine they wouldn't try to work out a deal to go the 'cinematic universe' route that so many studios are going nowadays and bring Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees and Freddy Kreuger all under one roof and together in multiple films.

But that's all just speculation. Let's see where this ends up.

Source: Bloody Disgusting