Jake Gyllenhaal Is Why Halloween Reboot Trilogy Happened

“I picked up the phone, and he [Jake Gyllenhaal] said, ‘Hey Jamie, my friend David Gordon Green’—who he had just worked with on the movie Stronger—’ would like to talk to you about a Halloween movie.'” Curtis recently told SFX Magazine. The actress went on to say that the call occurred in the summer of 2017 and that the last thing she expected to be doing five years ago was begin work on yet another Halloween film.

The connection Jake Gyllenhaal was able to initiate between the 64-year-old actress and Green resulted in some of the better entries in the Halloween series. Halloween (2018) was well received upon release, while its sequel, Halloween Kills, was met with some harsher criticism from critics and fans alike. Despite being almost universally panned, most people agreed that Kills did have the single most brutal depiction of Michael ever put on screen and featured some particularly gnarly kills.Oh, of course, when it comes to Halloween Ends, half the fandom would probably like to slug Jake Gyllenhaal in the eye while the other half plants a big, wet one right on his lips. To say Ends was divisive is an understatement. While the Halloween fandom will likely never reach the sheer numbers or intensity of the Star Wars fandom, if a comparison were to be made between the two, it would be that Halloween Ends is the franchise’s The Last Jedi.

Still, Halloween as an IP was in a rough place when Jake Gyllenhaal made that fateful phone call to Curtis, his Godmother. The franchise had essentially laid dormant ever since Rob Zombie killed it in 2009 with Halloween II. If it wasn’t for the 42-year-old actor going to bat for his director friend, who knows how long Michael Myers would have spent pushing up daisies?

On the other hand, that also means that Jake Gyllenhaal is at least partly responsible for one of the most confusing continuities in horror history. Thanks to the reboot trilogy that Jake helped to birth, the Halloween franchise now has five—five!—different timelines. Even worse, there are three movies in the series named “Halloween” with no other numbers or subtitles to differentiate them.The first timeline includes Halloween (1978) and Halloween II (1981), as well as the Thorn trilogy consisting of Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988), Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989), and Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995.)As most fans know, Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) is entirely its own thing, unconnected to the rest of the films.

Meanwhile, timeline three ignores the last three movies and goes from Halloween 1&2 to Halloween: H20 (1998) and ends on what many consider the series’ low point, 2002’s Halloween: Ressurection. One thing of note about the otherwise forgettable Halloween: Ressurection: it was billed as Jaimie Lee Curtis’s last time playing Laurie Strode—understandable, seeing as how she dies in the first 10 minutes. So, in a sense, Jake Gyllenhaal didn’t just resurrect the Halloween franchise itself; he also helped to bring Laurie Strode back to life.

Rob Zombie’s two Halloween remakes make up the fourth timeline, with David Gordon Green’s reboot trilogy acting as the fifth—and so far final—Halloween timeline.Phew!Now, if we could just get Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Englund on the phone together, maybe he can resurrect A Nightmare on Elm Street next.