It may come as a surprise to those of us who always loved his films, but the reputation of director John Carpenter wasn’t always so sterling.

Today, Carpenter is universally regarded as one of the great American genre filmmakers, the auteur of a half dozen gritty classics renowned for their steady pacing, pulsing electronic scores, and raw action. In an attempt to cash in on this new consensus, Hollywood has spent the last decade announcing a flurry of remakes, reboots, and reimaginings of his classic films.

In 2018, Blumhouse Productions’ Carpenter-sanctioned (and scored) Halloween sequel brought in $255 million on a $10 million budget. It’s now the highest grossing slasher film in history. And this summer, that same studio announced it was working with Carpenter on yet another reboot of one of his classics — 1982’s The Thing  — despite the fact that there was already a prequel made by another studio less than a decade ago.