Rob Zombie today reacted to the news that his take on Halloween had lost its Labor Day box office record to Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of The Ten Rings with a happy acceptance that all records are there to be broken and Michael Myers had been given a pretty good run before being dethroned. The director, who is current working on his The Munsters reboot, took to his Instagram account to give his reaction and there was certainly a joviality about it.
“It took 14 years but it finally happened! Big Mike was knocked out of the top spot by a Kung-Fu Master. 14 years is a pretty good run,” Rob Zombie said in the post, sharing the Movieweb headline about Shang-Chi’s victory over the last weekend.
Shang-Chi opened at the box office with a huge $90 million over the entire holiday weekend, with $29.6 million of that coming on its first day and almost breaking the record there and then. With Labor Day in normal circumstances being a weekend that is avoided for new releases, Zombie’s reimagining of the Halloween franchise has been sitting as the record holder since 2007 when it netted just over $30 million.
While there were some worries over how well Shang-Chi’s theatrical only release would fare, coming at a time when many studios have been a little cautious about releasing their big movies in theaters alone, with some opting to push on with Day and Date releases and other pushing back movies to next year. It seems that the worries were pretty much alleviated within the first 24 hours, and everyone at Disney were able to breath a sign of relief, especially when the movie also went on to have the highest rating of any Marvel movie on Rotten Tomatoes.
While Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings may have kicked one version of Michael Myers into oblivion, as is normal with the horror genre, you just can’t keep a good maniac down, and another version of the masked killer is already heading to cinemas next month in Halloween Kills. The movie is a sequel to David Gordon Green’s reboot of the Halloween franchise from 2018, and sees the return of Jamie Lee Curtis again as Lorrie Strode. The movie had its premiere screening at the Venice Film Festival, and while fans were fully on board the bloody mayhem, critics were a little less enthusiastic about yet another addition to the franchise.
Rob Zombie, meanwhile, is currently going full steam ahead working on his Munsters movie and has been keeping fan regularly updated, having posted an image of the continuing building work on the Mockingbird Lane set which is being built especially for the movie. In the last months, Zombie has been posting photos of face casting processes, wig making, make-up effects and has promised that much more behind the scenes footage is coming via the Munsters official YouTube channel for those who want to keep up to date with his latest updates.
Meanwhile, you can see the Michael Myers defeating Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings in cinemas now, and Halloween Kills is likely to take a good shot at the number one spot when it releases on October 15th.