The Halloween franchise has been a huge part of Jamie Lee Curtis' career. The film introduced her to Hollywood and got her career started. She's also been part of, now thanks to the new Halloween, a total of five films in the franchise. However, while the films have clearly been important to her, she does have regrets. Specifically, Curtis now says that she regrets coming back to the franchise 20 years ago and making Halloween H2O without writer/director John Carpenter and producer Debra Hill being involved. According to Curtis...
Now, to this day, I regret that I didn't say to everyone, If Debra Hill's not the one producing this movie, I'm not doing it. But what ended up happening was, she wasn't part of it, John wasn't part of it, and I was still part of it, and it was a machine going down the road. I was excited about it, and, honestly, I was going to be paid well. I hadn't made any money on the Halloween franchise at all. I mean, really, in all of those years I hadn't really made any money. It just gave me a lot of fame. And now I was going to get a paycheck.
In many ways, the brand new Halloween, which has come 40 years after the original, owes a lot to H2O, the Halloween film that was made 20 years after the original. Both films saw Laurie Strode alive but suffering from the ill-effects of having barely survived Michael Myers in the original Halloween. Overall, fans and critics mostly enjoyed H2O. It was one of the better Halloween sequels at the time, though most would probably agree the new Halloween is superior.
However, while a lot of people love that particular sequel, it seems Jamie Lee Curtis is less happy about one aspect of it. She tells Entertainment Weekly that, originally, she pitched the idea of doing a 20-years-later Halloween movie to John Carpenter and Debra Hill, and while it seems there was some initial interest in both parties to be involved, eventually they both left the project, leaving Jamie Lee Curtis as the only one returning. She wishes now that she had fought to make sure Carpenter and Hill were part of the film, though she admits she got her first big paycheck from the franchise as a result, which is probably something of a comfort.
While Curtis says she regrets being the only one who returned for H2O, she otherwise only has good things to say about the movie. She points out that the Laurie Strode of that movie is one who ran for her life, rather than the one who got ready for a fight in the new Halloween, which allowed the actress to explore post-traumatic stress in a particular way.
Unfortunately, Debra Hill could not be part of the new Halloween either, as she passed away in 2005, but John Carpenter did work on the movie as a producer and also wrote new music for the film, including an updated version of the classic Halloween theme.
