Here's why a messy rights lawsuit prevents Friday The 13th: The Game from receiving future updates. The original Friday The 13th was heavily inspired by the success of Halloween. John Carpenter's 1978 slasher was made for a tiny budget and later became one of the most successful independent movies of all time. Friday The 13th director Sean S. Cunningham designed his movie around the formula pioneered by Halloween, featuring a group of camp counselors being picked off one by one by a mystery killer.
The big selling point of Friday The 13th was the gore, with each kill being creatively gruesome. The original film also played like a whodunnit, with the killer eventually revealed as Pamela Voorhees, who was driven insane by the death of her son Jason. The movie was a massive success, so Jason himself would be resurrected as the killer for Friday The 13th Part 2. The franchise's robust formula would see it receive almost annual sequels throughout the 1980s. Jason would later crossover with the Nightmare On Elm Street series for Freddy Vs Jason and a remake arrived in 2009, which was the last entry in the franchise to date.
The series has also received a couple of video game adaptations, including 2017's Friday The 13th: The Game. This title is primarily a multiplayer experience, where gamers control counselors as they try to survive attacks by another player controlling Jason himself. The game was a loving ode to the franchise, capturing the atmosphere of the movies and dropping numerous easter eggs. Fan reaction was initially mixed since it suffered from numerous bugs and server issues, though patches would smooth out the experience.
With no new movie on the horizon, Friday The 13th: The Game became the place for fans to get their Jason fix. The title also received a steady steam of updates, adding classic characters like Roy Burns - the Jason copycat killer - from Friday The 13th: A New Beginning. Sadly, it was announced by publisher Gun Media in June 2018 there would be no further Friday The 13th updates due to a lawsuit between Sean Cunningham and Victor Miller, the screenwriter of the original movie.
The lawsuit is quite tangled, but in short, Miller sent a termination notice to the producers of Friday The 13th, invoking a copyright provision that allows authors to reclaim ownership of material after a period of time. Miller claims he wrote the original movie as a spec script, while Cunningham states Miller penned Friday The 13th as an employee of the Manny Company. The suit is likely to continue into the foreseeable future, meaning no new movies can be made.
This also means no more Friday The 13th: The Game updates too. The title will continue to receive maintenance patches, and it will be released for the Nintendo Switch in August 2019, but no new characters or content can be added. This is a real shame, since Friday The 13th: The Game was doing an excellent job of adding fun updates, but the lawsuit eventually made that impossible. Hopefully, Jason's legal limbo will end soon and he can get back to doing what he does best.