‘Halloween’ Producer Wants to Remake ‘Friday the 13th’
Speaking with comicbook.com, producer Ryan Turek revealed that he and Jason Blum, owner of Blumhouse films, would love to get their hands on the Friday the 13th franchise.
Friday the 13th would be the franchise that I would love to work on next. Jason Blum shares that same passion. That is something that is unfortunately complicated. I mean, there’s all sorts of stuff going on not [just] with the video game, but legal stuff. But, if it came our way, I mean I would be on cloud nine. It would be absolutely incredible to do. I feel a little bit smoother, because, I think there are only a few promises you’d need to make when it comes to Friday the 13th. That’s, you know, you gotta deliver on a summer camp. You gotta deliver on counselors. You gotta deliver on Jason Voorhees.
Ryan Turek
The Friday the 13th franchise has been long stagnant, the last film in the series having been 2009’s reboot produced by Michael Bay in his “I’m going to remake all the popular horror movies” phase. While Platinum Dunes’ film was successful (it brought in more money than any other Friday the 13th film not named Freddy vs. Jason), it wasn’t enough to save it from development hell, courtesy of major rights issues. Original screenwriter Victor Miller won a long-lasting legal battle over the rights back in September, though the settlement is pending.
In the 1980’s, there was a new Friday the 13th film almost once a year. The rights lapsed from original owner Paramount in the early 1990’s and Warner Brothers scooped up the franchise for it’s New Line studios–the same studio that owns fan-favorite Freddy Krueger and the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. As soon as that acquisition was complete, fans began clamoring for a team-up film, which they got in the form of the last film in the original continuity: Freddy vs. Jason in 2003.
The hope, of course, is that Jason Blum can work his magic and align the studios and copyright owners and make a new Friday the 13th flick happen.
Rich Davenport graduated from Concordia University in St. Paul Minnesota with a B.A. in Mass Communication. He is a lifelong comicbook reader, a film fan and a hardcore video gamer. He also makes a lot of funny faces in pictures, much to his wife’s chagrin.
