As you may be aware, the Friday the 13th film series is currently in an unfortunate state of legal limbo.
Long story short, Victor Miller, screenwriter of the original movie, is attempting to take back the rights to the franchise. Basically, the worst case scenario would see all future Friday the 13th pics released in the United States having to be made without the character of Jason Voorhees. On the flip side, movies made under that banner overseas can include him but are banned domestically.
Regardless of that possibly grim outcome, there are those of us holding out hope. But perhaps we shouldn’t, as Platinum Dunes producer Brad Fuller offered a bit of an update today, and it’s not sounding too good.
“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,” Fuller admitted. “The fans reach out to us; Andrew [Form] 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.”
Continuing on, he said
“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. And now the movie is at New Line, and we’ve made a lot of movies with those guys, but that’s not our home studio anymore.”
Finally, the producer admitted that unfortunately, at this time, he doesn’t have a clear answer for fans on if we’ll ever get another Friday the 13th.
“So the question is, [does New Line] want to make the movie with us? If they want to make that movie with us, we will drop what we’re doing to make that movie. We had such a great experience making Friday the 13th, it was a dream come true to watch those movies as a kid and then be a part of it. So I don’t really have a clear answer.”
Of course, the past few years have seen more than a couple abortive attempts to breathe some life back into Jason’s mouldering bones, but they’ve all (appropriately enough for the character) wound up stuck in development hell (the less said about the awful 2009 reboot the better). Not only that, but the brilliant Friday the 13th video game proves that there’s still interest in the property.
Fingers crossed, then, that Fuller and the rest of the team can get everything sorted out and find a way to bring back one of the scariest slashers of all-time.
