Hal­loween and the art of ret­con­ning a franchise

Although David Gor­don Green’s Hal­loween trades on its audience’s nos­tal­gia for John Carpenter’s 1978 orig­i­nal, it also buries the past. This new Hal­loween is ret­con­ning the sev­en pre­vi­ous sequels – as well as the Rob Zom­bie remakes – essen­tial­ly ask­ing us to for­get that they ever hap­pened and accept this as the sec­ond film in the franchise.

It may sound like an odd move, but ret­con­ning is a sur­pris­ing­ly com­mon tac­tic. It can mean chang­ing or expung­ing details from pre­vi­ous films, such as X‑Men: Days of Future Past gloss­ing over Pro­fes­sor Xavier’s death, or the shuf­fling con­ti­nu­ity in the Fast and Furi­ous fran­chise. How­ev­er, some sequels just out­right pre­tend their pre­de­ces­sors nev­er exist­ed. So does this prac­tice work, and what do lovers of a par­tic­u­lar fran­chise do with those loose ends?

The last 20 years have seen the ret­con­ning craze grow, as fran­chis­es become inter­con­nect­ed rather than a series of self-con­tained sto­ries. The bag­gage of a bad sequel becomes more prob­lem­at­ic, so when Bryan Singer want­ed to delve into a Richard Don­ner-inspired inter­pre­ta­tion of The Man of Steel for 2006’s Super­man Returns, he pitched it as a spir­i­tu­al Super­man 3 – ignor­ing the lat­ter two Christo­pher Reeve films. So, no drunk Super­man or Richard Pryor.

Rid­ley Scott almost glee­ful­ly jet­ti­soned the Alien Vs Preda­tor films when he made Prometheus, with Guy Pearce’s por­tray­al of Peter Wey­land con­tra­dict­ing the first AvP film. ​“I said [to Scott], ​‘You know, Wey­land was a char­ac­ter in one of the Alien Vs Preda­tor movies’,” writer Damon Lin­de­lof has said. ​“He just sort of looked at me like I had just slapped him in the face. That was the begin­ning, mid­dle and end of all Alien Vs Preda­tor ref­er­ences in our sto­ry process.”

Some­times the past is too big to ignore com­plete­ly. Disney’s new Star Wars films ref­er­ence the much-maligned pre­quels in spin-offs Rogue One and Solo, but the main saga bare­ly men­tions them at all (it’s very unlike­ly fans will ever hear the word ​“Midichlo­ri­ans” again). Then there are the Ter­mi­na­tor films, which at this point has the bag­gage of three flop sequels fol­low­ing the beloved first two instal­ments. It’s lit­tle won­der that the James Cameron-pro­duced 2019 reboot is intend­ed as a direct sequel to Ter­mi­na­tor 2: Judg­ment Day.

Whether or not these fresh starts are suc­cess­ful is a mat­ter of opin­ion, but it’s fair to say that the results tend to be mixed. Super­man Returns was well received crit­i­cal­ly, but less so by fans; Prometheus was seen as some­what of a dis­ap­point­ment; while 2006’s Rocky Bal­boa scored a box office knock­out despite com­plete­ly ignor­ing the events film that came before it. The Hal­loween fran­chise has ben­e­fit­ed from ret­con­ning before: 1998’s Hal­loween H20 erased sequels four to six and was rea­son­ably well liked – enough to jus­ti­fy a sequel, Hal­loween: Res­ur­rec­tion, in 2002. How­ev­er, both have now been ret­conned them­selves by 2018’s Hal­loween. Still with us?

Much like reboots, the effi­ca­cy of ret­con­ning entire films relies entire­ly on if the new sto­ry is any good. It leaves fans in a con­ti­nu­ity jum­ble, where the films they love may be con­tra­dict­ing what hap­pens mov­ing for­ward. It does, how­ev­er, offer a way for us to tai­lor our own rela­tion­ships with the films we love, offer­ing dif­fer­ent options in terms of what we acknowl­edge as true nar­ra­tive. For some, the mere men­tion Indi­ana Jones and The Leg­end of The Crys­tal Skull is enough to induce a fever, while the inter­net is ablaze with dif­fer­ing opin­ions on what Star Wars instal­ments are true to the orig­i­nal vision. Sequels are unlike­ly to please every­body (or in some cas­es, any­body), but if stu­dios are hap­py to sim­ply aban­don unde­sir­able sto­ries, why shouldn’t we?

The one thing that con­tin­ues to expand in the enter­tain­ment indus­try is choice. Where once watch­ing your favourite movie involved a dri­ve to the cin­e­ma or video shop, you can watch what you want, when you want it, via any medi­um you wish. With so much con­trol over how we watch films, it’s only a small leap to omit the offend­ing works from our DVD shelves or stream­ing queues. The fan takes back con­trol, and no-one needs to receive a nasty tweet.

We’ve all expe­ri­enced that feel­ing of block­buster dis­ap­point­ment. Whether you hat­ed the infa­mous ​‘Nuke The Fridge’ sequence, baf­fled by The Archi­tect of The Matrix, or baulked at emo Peter Park­er, big bud­get sequels have a habit of hurt­ing the things you love. How­ev­er, as the pos­i­tive reviews for 2018’s Hal­loween are prov­ing, redemp­tion is always pos­si­ble, and even if it isn’t, we can always pre­tend it nev­er happened.