The Halloween Reboot We Never Got To See
If there's one thing that seems common across all horror movie monsters, it's that none of them stay dead for long. Jason Voorhees may go off to Manhattan or the furthest reaches of space, but he's never gone for too long when it comes to stabbing teenagers. Freddy Krueger may be a dream demon, but no kids have managed to find a way to get rid of him for good at this point. And even though Michael Myers is supposedly just a guy wearing an inside-out William Shatner mask, no one has been able to dispatch him.
That could all change in the near future with "Halloween Kills" and "Halloween Ends" on the horizon, which will pick up where 2018's "Halloween" left off with Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) going back up against her perpetual tormentor, and while you'd hope she'd get some solace after all these years, that's unlikely to be the case. After all, the studios have to keep these movies going, so the monsters pretty much have to remain immortal, and while it seems like there have been more "Halloween" movies than you can count at this point, there could've been a lot more.
Most horror fans are familiar with the attempt to get "Halloween 3D" off the ground repeatedly before it was quietly put to pasture. But there was actually another attempt to revive the franchise in the 21st century long before the 2018 reboot.
Halloween Returns would've been a 'recalibration' of the franchise
No, we're not talking about "Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers."
While "Halloween Returns" would've followed the two "Halloween" reboots that were directed by Rob Zombie, it would've been its own story, taking inspiration from some of the original films while ignoring a large portion of the series' mythos. The script was written in 2015 by Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, who are perhaps best known for writing "Saw IV," "Saw V," and "Saw VI," and would've followed Michael Myers decades in the future after the events of the original 1978 film (via The Horror Syndicate). This time around, instead of terrorizing Laurie, the focus would've gone to characters more associated with "Halloween 2" like Dr. Paul Rogers and Gary Hunt (Hunter Von Leer).
We'll never know how some of these controversial decisions would've played out as the film never got that far into the production process. According to reports, Dimension Films lost rights to the franchise before filming was set to begin, which meant a new distributor had to be found for the movies going into the future. Over time, the rights landed at Universal Pictures in tandem with Blumhouse Productions, and that paved the way for a new version of "Halloween" to come to the big screen, written by Danny McBride, David Gordon Green, and Jeff Fradley.
In case you're curious about what might've been, you're in luck. The "Halloween Returns" screenplay by Melton and Dunstan is actually available online for all to read. You can check it out for yourself and determine if you would've rather seen it or if scrapping it was the right call.