The producers behind the abandoned Friday The 13th sequel have explained why another movie is being delayed. Friday The 13th started life as a low-budget horror made by the producers to cash-in on the success of Halloween. The movie's mix of gruesome kills and genuine scares made it a surprise hit, so a sequel was quickly put into production. The second movie introduced Jason Voorhees as the killer, and the character would soon become a slasher icon, especially when he donned his trademark hockey mask in the third film.
Paramount milked the series dry during the 1980s, before calling it a day with the eight entry Jason Takes Manhattan. Sporadic sequels have appeared in the years since, with Freddy Vs Jason pitting the two famous boogeymen against one another in a gory showdown in 2003. Jason's last big screen appearance to date was the 2009 reboot, and while the movie ended with a sequel tease, the franchise has been trapped in development hell ever since.
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A new Friday The 13th directed by Breck Eisner almost went into production at the beginning of 2017, only for the studio to get cold feet and cancel it due to the underperformance of horror sequel Rings. The movie - which would have been the 13th movie in the franchise - was set to be produced by Brad Fuller and Andrew Form, and the two recently spoke with Arrow In The Head about the project's last-minute collapse:
Fuller: One of the biggest heartbreaks of the last couple years was that we were about to make that movie and it fell apart. That still hurts. The fans reach out to us; Andrew doesn't really engage because he's not on Twitter, but I am and I hear from the fans and that's all they ask about. We get asked about that more than anything else.
Form: That one still hurts every day. We were a couple of weeks from filming on that one, Guzikowski wrote an unbelievable script, we found the camp... That one still hurts.
Since the cancellation of that sequel, the series has become embroiled in a lawsuit with Victor Miller - who wrote the first movie and created the character of Jason - attempting to gain the rights to the series. Fuller explained that until the suit is settled, another movie is unlikely:
Fans think it's so simple, that if we want to make the movie we can go make it, and that's just not the case. There are rights issues; originally, Warner Bros. owned the rights, then Paramount had them for a couple of years, and now I think the rights are reverting back to Warner Bros. At the same time, there's this on-going lawsuit with Victor Miller. If there's a lawsuit hanging over the rights, it's problematic, you can't really make the movie until that gets settled.
It's proven surprisingly difficult to get another Friday The 13th movie going, and in the years since the 2009 reboot, multiple scripts have been written and rejected. The cancellation of part 13 feels like an epic case of bad timing in hindsight; Paramount pulled the plug because they feared horror wasn't popular, only for the genre to explode later in the year thanks to the likes of Get Out and IT. If a new Friday The 13th had arrived in 2017 as planned, it coulee have well become a major hit.
In the meantime, fans have taken to Friday The 13th: The Game to fill the void. The game is a loving homage to the franchise, with players teaming up to survive and escape from Jason himself. The game even includes series deep cuts like the recent inclusion of Roy Burns, the secret killer of the fifth movie Friday The 13th: A New Beginning. The game has received praise from Friday The 13th fans for its attention to detail and capturing the tone of the series.
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Source: Arrow In The Head