12 Movie Franchises That Ruined Their Iconic Character
7. Halloween (Michael Myers)
John Carpenter's original Halloween created one of the most enduring horror icons of all time in Michael Myers, no matter that the overwhelming majority of the nine sequels and spin-offs that have followed (so far) are really quite terrible.
Casual fans often forget that the twist of Michael being Laurie Strode's (Jamie Lee Curtis) wasn't introduced until Halloween II, and the first film simply saw an embodiment of evil hacking apart babysitters in a quiet, middle-class suburb.
It had a purity to it that the sequels abandoned in favour of the melodramatic family connection, not to mention the involvement of a cult and the increasingly supernatural recuperative and teleportation abilities of Myers himself.
The absurdity eventually reached peak levels, at which point Rob Zombie was drafted to reboot the series, leading to the ill-advised 2007 prequel-reboot Halloween.
The film needlessly devotes much of its run-time to demystifying and humanising Michael Myers, when the character was always far more interesting as an ambiguous cipher on which the audience could project whatever they wanted.
The early word is that the 2018 sequel to the original Halloween has restored Myers' good name, but wait and see.