Why Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends didn’t film back-to-back

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

David Gordon Green's Halloween brought Michael Myers back in a big way and it didn't take long before it was announced that the film would be followed by two sequels, Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends. It was initially thought that both films would be shot back-to-back, but that plan obviously fell through as the third film hasn't started shooting yet.

While speaking with THR, Andi Matichak, who plays Laurie Strode's granddaughter in both films, said that the shooting schedule for Halloween Kills wound up being a little too intense to do both sequels at the same time.

Yeah, that was something that was toyed with; they thought about doing them back to back. But Halloween Kills was just so ambitious. It was such an intense shooting schedule that it would have been a bit much to try to do them at the same time. So we didn’t. We just have Halloween Kills in the can, and if Allyson is lucky enough to make it out of Halloween Kills, then I think that the third one will be filmed in the foreseeable future.

Halloween Kills wrapped up production in late 2019, but the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed the release of the film back several times. Although Andi Matichak hasn't seen the final film for herself yet, she has seen bits and pieces in the editing room, and although she couldn't say much, she said that she was "blown away with how big, wonderfully chaotic, mad and ambitious [the script] was" and that the sequences she saw in the editing room "just affirmed that we were able to achieve all of those things." I can't wait!

Halloween Kills is now slated to hit theaters on October 15, 2021, followed by Halloween Ends on October 14, 2022.