Category: halloween

‘Halloween Kills’ Heads for Killer $50M even with dual Peacock debut

The Halloween mood has set into the box office..

James Bond pic ‘No Time to Die’ while Ridley Scott’s historical epic ‘The Last Duel’ is bombing in its debut..

Enter Michael Myers..

At this point, even with the Peacock release along with theaters, the newest inception into the foray of Halloween flicks is set to debut at $50 mil or more; Quite the success story given some spate of negative reviews from critics. Movie goers have set into two camps: LOVE OR HATE. Very few happy mediums..

The bloodiest installment yet imagines a world where Halloween 2 never occurred, so neither did any other.. The opening sequence provides a beautifully made 1978 flashback scene that would theoretically show us what the Shape did after he escapes Dr. Loomis’ gunfire.. This film even includes a Loomis lookalike to ad the ambiance to to the scene. When we fast forward to the modern times, Michael escapes a fire and murders fire fighters. the elderly.. anyone else who accidentally gets in his way. The trail of blood is long and cruel in HALLOWEEN KILLS..

Well..

The name is Halloween Kills.. so that.

Filmmaker David Gordon Green’s R-rated slasher pic earned $22.9 million on Friday from 3,705 theaters in North America for a projected $50 million weekend. Halloween Kills also launched Friday on Universal’s sister streaming service Peacock.

What is interesting is that it is not just the nostalgia seekers going to HALLOWEEN KILLS.. According to exit polls, Halloween Kills is being fueled by younger consumers — 73 percent of Friday ticket buyers were 35 and under — and a diverse audience..

Jamie Lee Curtis used the opening success to brag a bit on Instagram about the achievement:

^{WE DIDN’T SUCK! What you don’t know about me is that I am incredibly competitive and yet always underplay expectations. Always have. I hide expectations and couch them behind the belief that the process is what is most important but at the end of the day you still want it to be successful for myriad reasons. Mostly for the fans and then the studio, the creative teams and all the hard work that people put into it.
When Freaky Friday started its release and everybody said it would do well I remember simply saying to everyone involved “I hope we don’t suck.” When that movie reached $100 million I had T-shirts made for all of us that said “we didn’t suck.”I think I may need to be getting some new T-shirts made for my Halloween family.
Happy Halloween!}

OFFICIAL NUMBERS COMING SUNDAY, BLOODY SUNDAY..

October 16, 2021
WE’VE GOT THE SPIRIT!

Every year, without a beat, we know it’s the Halloween season when we see the local vacant store front get its Spirit Halloween sign!

Yes, indeed, it starts around August.. vacant former Sears, KMarts, and stores of your past come to life with seasonal decor, frightful costumes, and that autumnal annual feeling of Halloween.

Year after year, Spirit Halloween stores seem to not only be the harbinger of the season, but also they inhabit more retail as times goes on. As of 2021, they are now 1,400 stores strong nationwide!

A recent NPR article showcased just how interesting their business model is.

Perhaps above all, Spirit’s business model hinges on space. Lots of it. Spirit looks for anywhere between 5,000 and 50,000 square feet of space, but in the company’s own words, “no store is too large (or too small)” — and the company has no problem finding the space it needs. Drop any ZIP code or address into the company’s store locator, and a flurry of orange arrows is almost sure to pop up. The company finds this space largely in abandoned buildings — malls that have shut down, retailers that have filed for bankruptcy and so on. “Spirit is pretty much a bottom-feeder business that works only at the expense of other stores; if there weren’t vacant storefronts, this business wouldn’t exist,” writes Rachel Quednau, program director for Strong Towns, an urban planning advocacy group that emphasizes incremental city planning.

Bottom feeders!

But with such splendor!

The 1,400 stores strong (and quite the reputation) shows how good they are at what they do. From January to August, the company spends its time scouring the country and scoping out properties for temporary leases.

So here are some interesting facts to consider this year when you enter the dreadful Spirit Halloween store.

It wasn’t at first even a Halloween store at all!

Spirit Women’s Discount Apparel was the first business venture from California entrepreneur Joe Marver. When he noticed how much success the costume shop next door was having around Halloween, he decided to swap his regular apparel for costumes for a limited time in 1983.

Sales were great, and the next year, he opened his first pop-up Spirit Halloween shop, which brought in $100,000 worth of revenue in just one month.

In the 1990s, Spencers entered the fray.. Spencer Gifts entered the Halloween market. The retailer purchased Spirit Halloween in 1999 when the pop-up chain consisted of around 60 temporary locations. By Halloween 2018, Spencer’s had grown the operation to more than 1300 stores in the U.S. and Canada.

Spirit Halloween donates tons of money to charity.. they help with retail hell, and they are also able to bring life to once darkened malls and stores. We should rejoice in their power! They are retail at its finest.. sure it may be fine to order your costume on Amazon, but somehow, someway, the Spirit begins with the Spirit Halloween store visit.

That is pretty cool considering retail has been dead for years.

Except on Halloween..
Except in the Spirit store..

October 11, 2021
Michael Myers vs the first responders

This was bound to happen! Judging from the trailers and clips release so far, John Carpenters next installment in the Halloween series threatens to pummel first responders.

The movie “Halloween Kills” seems to begin with first responders and firefighters trying to put out the fire that Laurie Strode set to kill Michael Myers.

Instead, and angry and burned Michael exits the home and begins to slaughter any firefighters he comes in contact with, seemingly with their own apparatus and tools.

Now.. A petition has emerged in which a fire fighter is trying to get people to sign onto the demand to cut those scenes from the movie! https://www.change.org/p/change-org-stop-the-petition-to-remove-the-slaughtering-of-firefighters-in-halloween-kills-2021

It’s probably fair to say that the petition is getting more attention with media than it is with signatures, but it was all those expected given the world we now live in. They cancel culture mixed with a overzealous ability to make first responders saints in a time of Covid and other social upheaval.

And now they have met Michael Myers in a movie. They’re being slaughtered, without mercy. John Carpenter warned us of this, and it may not just be the first responders who see their demise in this film. It’s been billed as a bloodbath, a record-setting murderous escapade on a Halloween night. No matter how many petitions emerge, the film is set for release on October 14.

October 9, 2021
HALLOWEEN KILLS looks unforgiving and relentless

HALLOWEEN KILLS look unrelenting..

On the anniversary of 9/11, it appears that Michael Myers will slaughter firefighters…

There appears to be no forgiveness..

The newest HALLOWEEN KILLS trailer begins with two children telling a woman (Kyle Richards’ Lindsey Wallace) about a man in a creepy white mask playing hide-and-seek with them. That man, of course, is Michael Myers. Later in the trailer, there are various nods to the much-maligned Halloween III: Season of the Witch, first with Michael showing off one of the masks from that film covered in blood as he attacks a family.

The family is later found dead in a playground wearing the skull and pumpkin masks.

Laurie Strode realizing she once again failed to kill Michael, who emerges from the burning home he was last seen in to murder several firefighters. She then recruits several familiar faces from the original film to help bring an end to The Shape once and for all…

Originally slated for a full theatrical release, Universal recently announced that Halloween Kills will premiere in both theaters and on Peacock day-and-date on October 15..

September 20, 2021
GRISLY HALLOWEEN KILLS WILL BE IN THEATERS–AND PEACOCK!

…my how the tune has changed?

Universal Pictures has announced a bit of a surprise for Halloween fans as they’ve revealed that Halloween Kills will be released day-and-date in both theaters and the Peacock streaming service on October 15th…

The streaming service will run you either $4.99 or $9.99 a month depending on if you want the ad-free plan, and Halloween Kills be will available for free to subscribers

September 11, 2021
#MichaelToo!?

Jamie Lee Curtis recently talked bout how the new Halloween trilogy is coincidentally inspired by social issues like the MeToo movement and the Capitol Hill Attack..

The film, set to be released in October, was shaped by events of the planet, according to the star.. #MeeToo in 2018, and mob violence later.. With the delay of Halloween Kills from 2020 to 21, more of that mob violence was on display in the world..

MORE FROM CURTIS:

“This all began when Jason Blum wrote David Gordon Green a one-word email: ‘Halloween?’ And David and Danny McBride conceived a trilogy. We got to see in the 2018 movie that Laurie had become the personification of trauma. It married at the time when the MeToo Movement was at it’s ascent. Here you have a movie about a woman traumatized for 40 years and she is now rising up. And it collided with what was happening globally.”

MORE..

“And what they’ve done with the second part of the trilogy was, ‘What happens when the rest of the people in that town get angry?’ We made the movie and the uprisings that started to happen where people were taking to the streets – it was all happening with what was to be the release of our movie. Which is about mob violence. So somehow they intuited in understanding that the next wave of trauma is rage. They wrote a movie about mob violence and five months later, the mobs started to gather. We were supposed to come out a year ago. And then Jan. 6 happened – this was supposed to be released in October of last year and now we’re watching a mob descend on the U.S. capital. That’s what the next movie is about: the town of Haddonfield, all of the people in the town who were also victims of Michael Myers. There’s a group of people who are very angry at the authorities and are going to take the law into their own hands.”

September 4, 2021
Halloween will End with a whimper?

FROM SLASHER TO CRASHER

The movie Halloween kills, coming out this October, is promising to be the ultimate bloodbath of Michael Myers movies.. it is being heralded by horror sites and advertised by John Carpenter as a true slasher of epic gory proportions..

If you like that..

But the final Halloween, set tentatively for October 2022, is apparently going to take a different route.

Malek Akkad says it will be “way more contained.”

This from Bloody Disgusting:

David Gordon Green similarly teases in the magazine’s new issue, “I get engaged by doing something different. If I was just going to be repetitive, I would hand the reins off to someone else. When you have that opportunity within an established franchise, it’s really fun to think about how you can show different tones and perspectives and evolve.”
As for Jamie Lee Curtis, who will be back as Laurie Strode in Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends, she tells Total Film that the latter movie is likely the last time she’ll play the character.
“I would say, given what I know about the next movie, I think it will be the last time that I will play her,” Curtis notes. “And I’m not saying something like, ‘Oh, because I die!’ It’s nothing to do with that. I’m talking about emotionally what they have constructed.
“I think it will be a spectacular way to end this trilogy.”

July 24, 2021