What was up with Halloween 3? How did can you have a Halloween movie with no Michael Meyers?
Here's the deal with
Halloween 3.
At the end of Part 2, the Shape is apparently killed for good (remember, Part 2 picks up
exactly where the first one left off). John Carpenter, who had written a treatment for Part 2 (somewhat reluctantly) had his work rejected, because the studio wanted
more blood and violence, something Carpenter kept at a minimum in the first film. So he vowed no more
Halloween films for him.
At the time Universal had the distribution rights for
Halloween 2 and any potential sequels. The second film did well enough for the studio to greenlight a third film. But Myers was dead, and no one could think of a reasonable way to bring him back.
So Universal decided to start an all-new series of
Halloween films, using the title, but none of Carpenter's characters. The studio planned to release a new
Halloween film once a year, each one totally different from the last. They would be stand-alone stories using Halloween in the title, but having absolutely no connection whatsoever with Michael Myers.
Halloween 3: Season of the Witch was the first (and only) film released using this idea. The story was about a company that manufactures deadly Halloween masks or something like that, right? Anyway, the film didn't do so well at the box office, and Universal lost interest in coming up with new story ideas. Who knows? If the film was successful, we may have had
Halloween films dealing with vampires, the living dead, mad scientists, aliens and other creatures. And old Mikey might still be dead. So several years pass until
Halloween 4 is greenlit for another studio, and Michael Myers rises once again.