There has not been a new Friday the 13th movie since 2009’s successful remake/requel, but there have been plenty of abandoned plans to revive the series with a variety of different canceled reboots. The Friday the 13th franchise has been through many incarnations. Since 1980’s Friday the 13th proved a sleeper hit upon release, the Jason Voorhees saga has encomed eleven sequels, multiple comic books and novels, and even a television show. Now, producer Bryan Fuller's prequel Peacock series Crystal Lake is set to finally bring back the franchise.
However, before this news, the Friday the 13th series was stagnant for over a decade. While Freddy Vs Jason, progressing to a canceled sequel for Friday the 13th 2009, and even including a found footage movie. As well as these, there was also an 80s-set reboot that viewers missed out on whose premise Crystal Lake may still revive.
Freddy Vs Jason’s Original Story (2000)
Easily the strangest of Friday the 13th’s many canceled spinoffs was also its earliest. The Nightmare On Elm Street villain eventually being revealed as Jason’s killer. Of course, this revelation would have derailed the Friday the 13th series pretty badly.
If Freddy was the one who caused Jason’s drowning, it wouldn’t make much sense for his mother Pamela Voorhees to spend the duration of the 1980s Friday the 13th killing camp counselors as revenge. Originally, Pamela’s killing spree was justified when she explained that a pair of canoodling counselors were responsible for Jason’s drowning when they failed to keep an eye on her son. Pamela’s plot-hole-ridden Friday the 13th franchise appearances already don’t add up, so it is arguably good that the producers of the series went with a much less outré storyline for Freddy Vs Jason when the movie entered production in 2003.
Friday the 13th 2009’s Sequel (2010)
After Friday the 13th 2009 proved to be a blockbuster success upon release, in October 2009, Warner Brothers Studios announced that a sequel would arrive a year after the first movie. However, by December 2009, Friday the 13th 2009’s sequel had been quietly dropped from the studio’s slate without an explanation. Despite this surprising development, producer Brad Fuller later announced that there was a completed script for Friday the 13th's 2010 sequel, coming from the same screenwriters as the original movie. Since Friday the 13th 2009’s plans to unmask Jason were cut late in production, a sequel from the same screenwriters could have brought back this idea and improved on the already-strong 2009 outing.
However, Friday the 13th 2009’s sequel never arrived. In 2013, Paramount regained the rights to the Friday the 13th franchise, and, while there have reliably been rumors about some Friday the 13th project or another ever since, a direct sequel to Friday the 13th 2009 has never been mentioned again. What this left room for, however, was some new attempts at rebooting the series. Friday the 13th 2009 had paved the way for a sequel to continue to Jason’s meaner, darker reinvention, but an entirely new reboot with a new studio could theoretically provide more room for creative freedom than a sequel.
The Canceled Found Footage Friday the 13th Movie (2015)
According to Fuller, Paramount considered a Paranormal Activity, or other successful found footage horror properties, Jason’s adventures always relied on a sense of distance between the viewers and the characters.
Many of the movies in the franchise leaned into the un-likability of their characters, leaving viewers rooting for Jason to kill them off. This was particularly true when Friday the 13th’s later sequels abandoned whodunit slasher mysteries to focus on Jason's antics, and this issue could have been a major problem for a found footage movie since the format requires viewers to spend the entire movie in the company of its main characters. Viewers never found out whether this would have been a disastrous approach as Paramount abandoned the idea, but this was still not the last nail in the Friday the 13th franchise’s coffin.
Friday the 13th’s 80s Reboot (2017)
After the found footage Friday the 13th movie failed to materialize, this freed the movie’s prospective director David Bruckner up when it came to potential creative approaches. Bruckner’s next idea, according to an interview with Friday the 13th franchise’s 80s-set reboot could have been a huge success, judging by the popularity of 80s nostalgia on the big and small screen in recent years.
However, this project was not to be. While Bruckner was attached to the Paramount version of Friday the 13th’s reboot since it was a found footage project, he stayed on board after that mandate was dropped and altered his original pitch to be the coming-of-age story outlined above. However, this pitch was also never followed through on and Bruckner eventually abandoned the project, resulting in it quietly being shelved sometime later. Although the project also attracted the involvement of Hannibal writer Nick Antosca and screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski, neither of these scribes was able to save the sequel. That said, as of November 2022, producer Bryan Fuller is working on a Friday the 13th prequel TV show for Peacock, meaning Crystal Lake might finally revive the long-dormant franchise and could even incorporate some of the 80s nostalgia that was proposed in Bruckner's pitch for the series.
