The term "reboot" has become somewhat ubiquitous in today's cinematic landscape, seemingly used for both clean slate re-imaginings of franchises, in-continuity return of long-dormant ones and anything in between. It's a confusing buzzword that has different connotations both within and outside of the filmmaking industry.
One producer who has some strong feelings about the term is Jason Blum.
Responsible for films like Paranormal Activity, The Purge, Whiplash and Get Out, Blum is also serving as producer on this year's Halloween; a film that some might brand as something of a "soft-reboot". Serving as a sequel only to the original 1978 film from John Carpenter, the David Gordon Green-directed Halloween is electing, as many new franchise films are, to ignore the less well-received entries and the muddled continuity therein.
Blum doesn't like using the word reboot, however, instead preferring the term reinvention, as he explains to Variety while also revealing the key to his recent success.
The way to get people interested is to not reboot. The term makes my hair stand up on the back of my neck. What we're doing with Halloween is, I guess I'll use the term 'reinvention'. Reboot just sounds so corporate. The way we attacked Halloween was to go after what we've done with a lot of other movies. David Gordon Green and Danny McBride are not known for horror, Jordan Peele was not known for horror before Get Out, so I think we've had a lot of success mixing genres of people - not the movie - the movie's a straight, scary movie, so I think we've got a very original voice with David Gordon Green and Danny, and having Jamie Lee Curtis and John Carpenter back in the mix to me was the beginning.
Obviously, this is all really just a matter of semantics at this point and the Halloween series has never been one for continuity. In fact, the franchise has retconned itself a number of times throughout its original eight movie run before genuinely rebooting itself with the 2007 Rob Zombie film. What it does do, however, is provide some insight into the way that Blum views his projects and the confidence that he has in the upcoming entry in the long-running horror franchise.
Halloween is set to hit theatres 19th October 2018.