10 Biggest Ever Movie Franchise Mistakes

The Halloween series is such a rollercoaster ride of ups, downs, and pure WTF decisions that it's difficult to point to any one mistake as causing the slasher franchise's downfall.

But surely its most spectacularly ill-advised gaffe was deciding to reveal heroine Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) as the secret younger sister of murderer Michael Myers in Halloween II.

While the original film derived enormous terror from the chilling randomness of Myers' attacks, adding a personal dimension to the Boogeyman's rampage undermined and even cheapened it.

And from that point on - save for the entirely unrelated Halloween III: Season of the Witch - the series became shackled to the Laurie-Michael relationship, even when Laurie was nowhere to be seen.

The fourth film, The Return of Michael Myers, had Laurie die off-screen due to Curtis' refusal to return, but in order to keep the familial dynamic going introduced Laurie's daughter Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris) as the new protagonist.

Though Jamie Lloyd became something of a fan favourite, she ended up dying by Michael's hand in The Curse of Michael Myers, but of course she also had her own young child who Michael now pursued.

Eventually Laurie's lineage became twisted enough that Curtis agreed to return for the seventh film, Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, which retconned the last three films in order to bring Laurie back to life.

Both H20 and its maligned sequel, Halloween: Resurrection, were still hopelessly married to the concept of Laurie and Michael being family, as were Rob Zombie's two divisive reboot movies.

It wasn't until 2018's Halloween that the familial link was finally severed once and for all. Acting as a direct sequel to the 1978 original, it threw out every subsequent sequel and flat-out stated that Laurie and Michael being related was total bulls**t.

Yet for almost four decades the franchise kept up this silly charade, one which massively constrained its storytelling potential.