Earlier this month, YouTuber Jimmy Champane released a video offering an update of the ongoing legal messiness around Friday the 13th, explaining why Jason Voorhees hasn’t found his way to theaters in over ten years. Now it seems that Champane has followed up that video with a similar breakdown for A Nightmare on Elm Street, a franchise that hasn’t been seen in cinemas since the 2010 remake, despite facing none of the legal complications that have kept Friday the 13th tied up.
While The Conjuring 2 and 3 scribe David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick was hired years ago by New Line Cinema to work on a reboot, you may have noticed that nothing’s really come of the endeavor just yet, and much like the writer himself implied last December, Champane pins this lack of activity largely on the success of The Conjuring Universe.
Essentially, so long as the horror franchise created by James Wan continues to fare well at the box office, New Line will stay focused on the cinematic universe at the expense of other properties. The commercial heights scaled by last year’s The Nun – currently the highest-grossing film in the franchise – feels especially damning for Elm Street, in that it demonstrates that the series can continue to make a whole load of money in the face of lousy reviews.
Until the bubble bursts for The Conjuring Universe, it seems that A Nightmare on Elm Street is being put on ice. Of course, that doesn’t rule out Freddy Krueger making a return somewhere down the line, especially if Robert Englund is still game for one more movie. But in the meantime, the world of Ed and Lorraine Warren persists with the release of Annabelle 3 on June 28th, 2019, followed by The Conjuring 3 on September 11th, 2020.
