Somewhat peculiarly, Miramax decided to release “Halloween H20” late in the summer season on August 5, 1998, as opposed to during the actual Halloween season in October. Instead, “Bride of Chucky” and, interestingly enough, John Carpenter’s “Vampires” would enjoy the spoils that October had to offer that year. In any event, audiences were quite happy to embrace a return to this franchise’s roots, even if the release date seemed less than optimal on paper.
“H20” placed third on the charts in its opening weekend with a $16.2 million haul, coming in behind Nicolas Cage’s “Snake Eyes” and Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” in its third weekend. Even against a relatively high (for this series) $17 million production budget, that was a damn good start. For context, “The Curse of Michael Myers” made just $15.1 million domestically during its entire run. Safe to say, the whole “bring back a familiar face after many years” strategy worked like gangbusters.
The film finished its run with $55 million domestically, which was a great result for a franchise that had all but run out of gas just a few years earlier. International figures are hard to come by, but Wikipedia cites an old issue of Variety that indicates that “H20” made $20 million internationally, which gives the movie a $75 million global finish. Adjusting for inflation, that would be around $140 million in today’s dollars, give or take. Assuming those overseas figures are even close to correct, that made it the biggest entry in the series up to that point, overtaking 1978’s “Halloween” ($70 million).
Success of that magnitude means only one thing when it comes to cinematic horror. Yes, the producers wanted to and ultimately would make a sequel. Unfortunately for Jamie Lee Curtis, that rubbed up pretty hard against what she had in mind, but that’s the nature of the beast.
Source From: www.slashfilm.com
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