Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday director Adam Marcus has confirmed grizzled bounty hunter Creighton Duke survived his brutal encounter with Jason. Friday The 13th is a franchise that did very well for Paramount throughout the 1980s. The movies were cheap to produce, featured an easy to follow formula and yielded tidy profits. Audiences grew bored with the series around the time of 1989's Friday The 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, which was the lowest-grossing entry up to that point. The series then went on hiatus for a few years, until New Line acquired the rights.
New Line had a Freddy Vs Jason movie in mind, but first, they decided to produce a solo Jason movie that would ‘kill’ the character. Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday proved to be a divisive entry, introducing a new body-hopping element, in addition to the reveal Jason has a sister. Adam Marcus later revealed he intended to imply Jason is actually a deadite from the Evil Dead franchise, which is how his mother Pamela brought him back to life. The Necronomicon and dagger from that series feature heavily in Jason Goes To Hell's finale.
Related: Friday The 13th's Jason Voorhees Is Indeed A Deadite
Despite being a controversial sequel, Jason Goes To Hell has grown a fanbase over the years for its wild tone, over the top gore and for taking risks with the formula. The movie also introduced the character of bounty hunter Creighton Duke (Steven Williams), who knows how to kill Jason once and for all. Marcus recently announced he was developing a spinoff for Creighton Duke separate from the Friday The 13th series - but considering Duke appears quite dead at the end of Jason Goes To Hell, some fans questioned how that would work. It turns out he survived his encounter with Jason, however, which Marcus revealed during an interview on the Without Your Head podcast and reiterated a solo Duke project is being developed.
Creighton Duke didn’t die. There’s the answer. He did not die. The way I shot it was to give you this moment of ‘Oh no!’, but honestly, he exhales, but you don’t really see the light go out of his eyes. And to that end, my new production company Skelton Crew is basically doing something to resurrect Creighton Duke as a standalone character.
During the finale of Jason Goes To Hell, Duke sacrifices himself to save the lead characters, with Jason snapping his back with a bear hug. Marcus states in the interview his own pitch for Freddy Vs Jason in the early 1990s would have brought back Duke as a supporting player. The director also spoke of some early concepts for Jason Goes To Hell including Jason’s evil brother Elias being the main villain during early drafts. The hero of that version was also supposed to be Tommy Jarvis from parts IV-VI, but since New Line didn’t own the rights to the character, the idea was abandoned.
The rights to the Friday The 13th series are currently locked in a nasty lawsuit, meaning no new movies or video games can be made. Creighton Duke is one element of Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday that fans can all agree worked about that movie, and it appears his proposed spinoff might be the only Friday The 13th related project on the horizon.
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Source: Without Your Head