The Friday the 13th franchise has produced twelve films to date, but there's a case to be made that the true ending was Jason Takes Manhattan. While a rights battle between producer Sean S. Cunningham and original writer Victor Millr is currently preventing further Jason entries from materializing, Friday the 13th remains one of the most beloved horror franchises out there. It may not be the most cerebral, but Friday the 13th's mix of sex, violence, and occasional humor is almost like comfort food to its devotees.
Notably though, when people reminiscence about the best moments to be found within the Friday the 13th movies, they almost always talk about the movies released by Paramount in the 1980s. Paramount always seemed to see Jason's adventures as beneath them, but the movies made big money on low budgets, so nearly every year in that decade saw a new Friday the 13th release. After the 1980s, slashers went out of style for awhile, leading Paramount to agree to sell control of future Jason installments to New Line Cinema, which was itself eventually purchased by Warner Bros.
This deal eventually led to the long-awaited Freddy vs. Jason, but first it gave fans 1993's Jason Goes to Hell, and 2001's Jason X. 2009 also saw a Friday the 13th remake come out, which made money, but failed to impress the Jason faithful. While all those films have their fans, they all feel quite different from the eight Paramount entries, and retcon lots of prior plot elements. It could be argued that the true end to the Friday the 13th saga was 1989's Jason Takes Manhattan, and well, we're about to do exactly that.
Friday the 13th Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan Definitively Killed Off Jason
Putting aside the fact that he clearly didn't drown in Camp Crystal Lake as a kid like mother Pamela Voorhees thought, Jason met his first actual death in 1984's Friday the 13th Part 4: The Final Chapter, which obviously didn't live up to its subtitle. Jason was killed by Corey Feldman of all people, and while Paramount attempted to replace him with a copycat villain in Part 5, Jason was resurrected Frankenstein-style in 1986's Friday the 13th Part 6: Jason Lives. Now a zombie, Jason proved all but invulnerable, and was dealt with in Part 6 and Part 7: The New Blood by trapping him at the bottom of the lake.
At the end of Jason Takes Manhattan, zombie Jason has also seemingly gained the ability to teleport, appearing in front of the people he was chasing in logistically impossible ways. Jason's final confrontation with his main targets heads into the New York City subway system, where it's inexplicably revealed that a river of toxic waste is released every single night. Needless to say, that's not true, but in the movie, Jason gets trapped inside the toxic waste, and while the final girl sees a vision of Jason's child self, his body appears to have been completely vaporized.
Jason's Return in Jason Goes to Hell Retcons Jason Takes Manhattan & His Friday the 13th Origin Story
That seemed to be the end of Jason until New Line resurrected him for Jason Goes to Hell. While it could be argued that Friday the 13th was overdue for a shakeup of its formula, Jason Goes to Hell went about doing that in a way that alienated fans, completely ignoring Jason Takes Manhattan's ending, and nonsensically turning Jason into a body-hopping demon. Thus, the actual Jason only appears for a few short minutes in a movie called Jason Goes to Hell. Jason X then took place in the future, and had no real connection to the prior films. For all its success, Freddy vs. Jason felt way more like A Nightmare on Elm Street movie than Friday the 13th. For those reasons, and the fact that it definitively ended the original Paramount run, Jason Takes Manhattan is the true end to Friday the 13th's story, no matter how laughable the whole toxic waste under New York City thing is.