10 Movie Franchises That Made The Same Mistake TWICE
9. Shifting The Focus Away From Michael Myers - Halloween
In one sense, you have to respect the filmmakers behind Halloween for actively trying to transition the slasher franchise away from its feature attraction twice despite the obvious financial appeal of keeping him front and center - even if neither attempt really worked.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch saw John Carpenter try to reinvent Halloween as an anthology franchise without Michael Myers, focusing instead on evildoers plotting to kill America's children with tainted Halloween masks.
It's not a bad movie by any means, but simply isn't what people wanted from the Halloween franchise, resulting in it under-performing critically and commercially, and putting the series on ice for six years.
It eventually returned with Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, which brought The Shape back for a run of mostly terrible sequels which at least turned a modest profit against their small budgets.
The series had its ups and many downs over the decades, but kept Michael the mainstay, even when original heroine Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) was nowhere to be seen.
But in Halloween Ends, the closing chapter in David Gordon Green's polarising new Halloween trilogy, Green went back to the idea of a Halloween movie without much Michael Myers at all.
Michael is absent from the entire first act and only has around 10 minutes of screen time throughout the nearly two-hour movie, with the focus being instead given to an entirely new character, Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell).
Unsurprisingly the choice didn't go down well with many fans, especially as the true finale to the original Michael/Laurie era, resulting in the lowest box office gross of the Green-directed trilogy.