As old horror franchises have gotten new leases on life in recent years, more and more people have just wanted to know why Friday the 13th can’t get the same treatment. While the series was kept semi-alive with a video game not too long ago, there hasn’t been a new movie since the 2009 reboot. It sounds like even with the recent plans to launch a Jason universe, it’ll be some time before Mr. Voorhees is back on screen, though not entirely for the reasons you think.
At the recent Texas Frightmare Weekend, series co-creator Sean Cunningham was asked point blank what the holdup was with another Friday flick. Instead of pointing a finger at the franchise’s infamously weird rights issues, he speculated the biggest obstacle is fear on the studio’s end. He doesn’t point a finger at any specific company, but he did say whichever studio could get the ball rolling likely doesn’t want to put substantial money into a project that “might not see a huge return on its investment.” As far as he’s concerned, there won’t be another movie for “at least” three years.
He went on to say movie-watching habits have changed due to the pandemic, which isn’t entirely false. Despite the performance of decent-sized hits like Dune: Part Two and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, not all box offices are equal. After The Fall Guy came out in early May, Universal recently put it on streaming while it’s still currently running in theaters. In the pandemic’s fairly early days, Warner Bros. and Disney elected to do same-day streaming with some movies like Mortal Kombat and Raya & the Last Dragon, which would make for good bragging with streaming numbers, but hit-and-miss in terms of box office performance.
That being said, big horror movies tend to do fairly well in theaters. Despite mixed or negative reviews, Tarot, The Strangers: Chapter One, and Night Swim have done solid in the box office. New Line, which owns the Friday the 13th trademark, is also the studio behind Evil Dead Rise and The Nun II, which both made their money back and then some last year. It’s not clear what makes Friday the 13th an outlier, ditto why it’s got such a weird streak of bad luck behind it.
Until that hypothetical new movie gets greenlit, Jason fans will have to comfort themselves with the Jason Universe: the Friday video game remains playable through the end of the year, and Jason himself is a playable character in MultiVersus, which launches next week.
[via Creepy Catalog]
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