There may be fanboy nods to other Halloween films, but in terms of story, this new movie picks up from H1 it seems, H2 at the hospital never happens.
What sucks is, by ignoring H2, then you have to come up with some way to write Loomis out of the picture, otherwise he'd surely be the one looking after Michale after the events of the film, though looking at JLC's age, he'd probably be dead of natural causes.
As for merchandise, we'll see what happens but the mask appears to be the Shatner carried on, so if that's the case, Three Zero could do a figure and but for some wear and tear, it'd essentially look like a '78.