It seems the legends of horror movies that dominated the VHS home market in the 80's and 90's are each one-by-one falling into obscurity. While many producers, writers and directors are keen to reboot or reimagine these once golden intellectual properties it seems any proposals fail to effectively capitalise on the profitability these properties once garnered. This has left many of these horror legends stuck in production limbo - Hellraiser, The Crow, Friday the 13th, and now Halloween.
The Halloween franchise began in 1978 under the direction of legendary director John Carpenter (The Thing, Escape from New York) and has since garnered seven sequels a remake and its accompanying sequel (both by Rob Zombie). Not bad for a franchise based on knife weilding psychopath whom likes to wear William Shatner masks.
Reportedly Dimension films, whom have distributed the last five Halloween movies over the course of the last twenty years have lost the distribution rights to the franchise. This has reportedly forced production studio Miramax to abandon the new Halloween project they were developing with director Marcus Dunstan and writer Patrick Melton in favor of starting from scratch with a new writer and director.
This would suggest that once miramax find a suitable distributor, the Halloween franchise, as with the Friday the 13th frnchise before it could be planning to reboot once again. Though whether this or any of these reported horror reboots will get past the devlopment stage is anyone guess.
