10 Movie Endings That Basically Doomed Their Franchise

7. Laurie Kills "Michael" - Halloween H20: 20 Years Later

The Ending

Laurie Strode's (Jamie Lee Curtis) intense final showdown with Michael Myers (Chris Durand) concludes with her unambiguously cutting his head off with an axe. Franchise over, right?

Why It Doomed The Franchise

Jamie Lee Curtis returning to the series for one final movie where she definitely puts Myers away is a great idea in theory, but of course, Hollywood loves money, and it's incredibly rare for studios to display actual artistic integrity and know when to say "enough" - especially in the horror genre.

Four years later, Halloween: Resurrection was released, which ret-conned Myers' death in the most hilariously stupid and insulting way possible, by revealing that Myers swapped his costume with a medic, whose larynx he crushed, preventing him from telling Laurie that she was about to decapitate him.

And to make matters worse, the movie began with Laurie being killed off after grabbing the idiot ball and refusing to kill Michael when she had the chance. Pfft.

The near-universal disdain for the film led to a 2007's Rob Zombie-led reboot and a painfully bad 2009 sequel, after which the series laid dormant for almost an entire decade, and last year's direct sequel to the 1978 original erased all the other sequels from the timeline.

Halloween 2018 wasn't bad, but after teasing a final, totally final showdown between Laurie and Michael, the film ended with yet another fake-out, with Myers' fate left ambiguous for the sake of the recently-confirmed sequel.

While on one hand H20 made it clear that Michael Myers will never die, it also demonstrated how little the franchise really thinks of its audience, which makes it tough to get even remotely invested in anything that's happening.