In the final moments of John Carpenter's seminal 1978 classic Halloween, after being shot six times and falling out of a two-story window, a seemingly dead Michael Myers suddenly vanishes into the night. What was originally intended as punctuation to one of Halloween's central themes has since become emblematic of both the character of Michael Myers and the Halloween franchise as a whole: even when you think they're down for the count, they always seem to come back.

With Halloween Ends on the horizon, Blumhouse's entire marketing campaign for the film has been centered on selling it as the end of the Halloween 'saga.' It is, after all, literally titled Halloween Ends. Everything about the film's packaging and promotion has an air of finality to it, and yet, in light of recent comments made by the cast and crew, it looks as if Halloween Ends will almost certainly not be the last time audiences see Michael Myers.

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Filmmakers have been trying to definitively kill off Michael Myers in the Halloween franchise since 1981. Hot off the trailblazing success of Carpenter's original Halloween and its ambiguous ending, audiences were clamoring for more, and they got it with Halloween II. The sequel saw Carpenter taking a backseat on the production, handing over directorial reigns to Rick Rosenthal, as Carpenter and Debra Hill remained on as writers and producers. Infamously, Carpenter did not want to do a sequel to Halloween at all (he has since said that the only way he got through the scripting process was by remaining consistently drunk) but was hell-bent on closing the book on Michael Myers with the sequel if they were going to do it.

Thus, Halloween II ends with Michael Myers getting both of his eyes shot out and then exploding to death. The final shot of Halloween II is, quite literally, a prolonged look at the burning corpse of Michael Myers. Ideally, this would have opened the door for Carpenter and Hill's envisioned anthology series, as demonstrated in the next year's Halloween III: Season of the Witch. Audiences, however, had other things in mind. Season of the Witch floundered at the box office, with general audiences enraged at the lack of Michael Myers in the Halloween sequel. This led to Michael rising from the dead once more in 1988's aptly named Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers.

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The resentment toward Season of the Witch's lack of Michael Myers remained so strong that Michael Myers' name was featured in the title of each of the next three installments just to reassure audiences that no such tomfoolery was being attempted again. The next time someone earnestly tried to finish off Michael Myers would be in 1998 with Steve Miner's Halloween H20. This sequel saw Jamie Lee Curtis returning to the Halloween franchise for the first time in over a decade with a singular goal in mind: to kill Michael Myers. One of the core pillars of Curtis' negotiated return was that she get to kill Michael at the end of the film, which was allegedly the plan -- until it wasn't.

Longtime Halloween producer Moustapha Akkad apparently had a clause that prohibited anyone from actually killing off Michael Myers for good, something that the makers of H20 (Curtis very much included) were not made aware of until they were already filming. This resulted in Halloween H20's seemingly definitive ending of Laurie Strode crushing Michael beneath an ambulance and then decapitating him with an ax, being executed in such a way that the next film could open with a twist retcon, revealing that it wasn't actually Michael.

Even both of the Rob Zombie remake Halloween films end with Michael seemingly dying gruesome deaths, only for the character to inevitably rise again. So while not as egregious as other horror slasher icons such as Freddy or Jason (each of whom have had multiple 'final chapter' installments throughout the decades), Michael Myers has a history of avoiding would-be finales. So does Halloween Ends stand a chance of actually ending things for the madman? Apparently not.

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Even when Halloween Kill and Halloween Ends were first announced by Blumhouse and director David Gordon Green as the followups to their own 2018 Halloween, the team was quick to add caveats to the finality of the title. Green almost immediately pointed out that it was the end of "our story" and that no one necessarily believed there would never be another Halloween film. Similarly, producer Jason Blum said, "I didn't say it's gonna be the last Halloween movie. It's our last Halloween movie. We have no more rights to make any more Halloween, so it goes back to Malek [Akkad]."

Following the success of Blumhouse's first Halloween, they entered into substantial months-long negotiations with Akkad to acquire further rights to the franchise so they could make more Halloween sequels. This ultimately resulted in the deal they are currently operating with, but Blum has been frank in the past about wanting to make many more Halloween sequels. So while Halloween Ends is technically the final Halloween film that Blumhouse is currently legally allowed to make, that could very easily change after release.

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Some of this uncertainty has even seemingly made its way into the final editing process of Halloween Ends. There have been rumors swirling for months that Blumhouse has been test screening two different cuts of Halloween Ends, allegedly one with an ending that is pleasing audiences and one that is not. These rumors were recently lent some credence by David Gordon Green himself when he confessed in a recent interview that the final edit "changes every day."

In recent weeks, even John Carpenter (who has returned to Halloween as an executive producer and composer for the new trilogy) has added his voice to the choir, saying simply, "If the movie makes money, I don’t believe it's the end." If anybody knows anything about definitively killing Michael Myers only to have money wind up being the factor that brings the character roaring back to life, it is John Carpenter.

Halloween Ends will almost certainly not be the franchise's end, especially if it performs as well financially as its immediate predecessors. And as wonderful as it would be to see someone revive Carpenter and Hill's anthology series idea, it seems pretty firmly established at this point that Michael Myers is the proverbial cash cow of the franchise, so he's not going anywhere for good. But Halloween Ends does seem like the definitive end for Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie Strode and creatives like David Gordon Green. So here's hoping that Curtis and Green get to go out on the satisfying conclusion they and this chapter of the Halloween franchise deserve.

Halloween Ends debuts in theaters and streaming on Peacock on October 14, 2022.