Why Has Another Friday the 13th Movie Been So Hard To Make?

You can’t kill Jason Voorhees. Just like Michael Myers, Friday the 13th’s hockey mask-clad villain was an unstoppable killing machine, personifying evil incarnate. Jason tormented campers and moviegoers alike for decades in a slew of solo movies that covered everything from one of Kevin Bacon’s earliest roles to whatever was going on in Jason X. Jason even proved enduring enough to have a 21st-century showdown with Freddy from A Nightmare on Elm Street and a 2009 Platinum Dunes remake.

For a while there, it looked like movie theaters were destined to always feature new outings involving Jason and his trusty machete. However, it’s been 16 years since the last Friday the 13th movie. For comparison’s sake, in that same space of time, horror geeks have witnessed three separate stabs at reviving the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies. Hollywood loves resurrecting tired horror brands. So what gives? Why has Friday the 13th seemingly gone dormant?

Friday the 13th Has Been Tangled in Rights Issues

A key element preventing Jason from getting endlessly exploited over the years has been the thorny issue of the franchise’s licensing rights. The Halloween saga, for instance, has floated across different distributors and production companies over the years, however, the underlying rights to this franchise have rested with producer Malek Akkad and his family for eons now. Modern horror franchise Saw, meanwhile, is firmly a Lionsgate/Twisted Pictures co-production. For many years, Friday the 13th was, in contrast, the center of disputes between Paramount Pictures and New Line Cinema.

Both companies produced different entries in the franchise and, in the 21st century, tried to exert as much control over the property as possible. Complications involving Paramount and Warner Bros. (which absorbed New Line Cinema in 2008) led to the demise of a straightforward sequel to the 2009 Friday the 13th remake, for instance. As part of a deal for Warner Bros. to get international rights to Interstellar, Paramount briefly got the full theatrical rights to make a new Friday the 13th movie. This seemed to bode well for the series to finally spark back to life since there’d be fewer studio politics to deal with.

Unfortunately for fans of Jason, Paramount in the mid-2010s was going through endless turbulence and box office woes. Despite setting countless dates for a new installment across 2016 and 2017, Paramount never actually got a new Friday the 13th going. These are the kind of mundane studio politics that have primarily kept the Friday the 13th saga on the bench even as other long-running horror sagas like Final Destination, The Exorcist, and The Blair Witch Project generate 2020s installments. However, some of these legal issues have been ironed out in recent years. New Line Cinema still controls the title Friday the 13th, but Jason Voorhees as a character and the franchise itself are now controlled by director Sean. S Cunningham, screenwriter Victor Miller, and Horror Inc.

[RELATED: Friday the 13th Prequel Series Crystal Lake Casts Scooby-Doo Star in Iconic Role (But Not Jason Voorhees)]

Other Reasons Friday the 13th Gone Cold?

Legal issues have been the primary problem plaguing the Friday the 13th saga, but the other issue is Jason Voorhees himself. Specifically, the kind of slasher movie Jason used to headline hasn’t always been in vogue in mainstream horror fare in the last 20 years. In the early 2010s, a wave of post-Paranormal Activity horror films emerged, inhabiting the found-footage genre. A mid-2010s renaissance of the genre spurred by The Conjuring, It Follows, The Babadook, and Get Out, also didn’t have much room for a masked killer slicing and dicing rowdy teenagers.

Various 2010s attempts by Paramount to reimagine the Friday the 13th saga as either a digital 3D project or a found-footage movie reflect how difficult it was for studio executives to imagine a straightforward Friday the 13th movie excelling in the post-2009 horror movie landscape. With Friday the 13th not immediately looking like something that could stir up big bucks at the box office, nobody had an incentive to cut through all that legal red tape in the 2010s.

There are even further reasons why Friday the 13th has gone dormant, including how it didn’t quite fit into the post-Halloween (2018) boom for horror legacy sequels. This saga didn’t have an iconic non-slasher villain character like Laurie Strode or Sydney Prescott that audiences would be stoked to see again. Naturally, Friday the 13th wasn’t pursued to fit into this trend. Despite these endless problems, there have been recent signs of hope for this saga. In May 2024, the Jason Universe was launched to take Jason across multiple different mediums. Meanwhile, that long-gestating Crystal Lake TV show appears to be gathering momentum.

Though it’s been gone from movie theaters for nearly two decades, these developments signal that Friday the 13th could eventually return to its big-screen origins. After all, doesn’t Jason always come back from the dead against impossible odds?

Friday the 13th is now streaming on Pluto TV.