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In October of last year, the unkillable Jason Voorhees was resurrected from his watery grave when streaming service Peacock officially greenlit a new television series based on the popular "Friday the 13th" franchise. "Crystal Lake" is written and executive produced by "Hannibal" showrunner Bryan Fuller in the first F13 project to emerge from the recently settled lawsuit between director Sean Cunningham and screenwriter Victor Miller.
In an interview with Fangoria's Scott Wampler, Fuller confirms as much as he can about the upcoming series, which has been pitched as a prequel show with little restriction on the iconography and characters up for depiction. Fuller tells Fango:
"We can use everything. We can go to Hell, we can go to space. That's not to say that we will do those things ... although if we do go 10 seasons, I will be lobbying hard to go to space. (Laughs) A24 and Marc Toberoff, who is Victor Miller's lawyer, have beautifully and excruciatingly assembled all of the Friday the 13th rights. As a streaming series, we have the rights to do everything underneath the Friday the 13th umbrella. The movie rights are a completely different thing. They are tied up at New Line and are super, super messy and probably won't be untangled anytime soon, but as far as us chickens in the television industry roost, we have access to anything and everything that Friday the 13th has done up until this point."
So far, Fuller has revealed that one season is contracted but there is a built-in incentive for Peacock to keep the party going for at least two, and that the budget is estimated to be roughly five times the budget of "Hannibal" — meaning that A24 and Peacock are prepared to spend millions per episode. That's a lot of hockey masks.
What we know so far
Fuller specifies the in-development series as a "pre-remake-uel," effectively closing off the events of Marcus Nispel's 2009 reboot "Friday the 13th." Notably, the Jason Voorhees of that Platinum Dunes-backed installment is one of the most physically intimidating, galloping towards his victims with wild berserker energy. Fans have been clamoring for more, but following a teaser image that turned out to be a false alarm, /FIlm's Ryan Scott estimates that the best feature-length sequel we can hope for is a legacy one like David Gordon Green's 2018 "Halloween" – something that discards the middle sequels and only addresses the canon of the original.
Fuller confirms that New Line Cinema, who have held the film rights since 1989, are entangled in legal muck thicker than Crystal Lake algae. But for the streaming series to happen, original screenwriter Victor Miller and original production entity Horror Inc. joined forces as executive producers, enabling the right to use Jason, his murderous mother Pamela, the mask, Crystal Lake, the whole shebang – they just can't make a movie about it. For more on the film rights mayhem, Lindsay Traves has a legal breakdown at the ready.
Fuller further promises that "we'll be dropping bodies every episode," keeping the kill count high and true to the franchise's slasher spirit. Finally, fans of "Jason X" can rejoice: though Fuller has mapped out three seasons' worth of material, he's eventually aiming to "rationally and dramatically" justify sending the masked menace back into space. Pre-2009 canon enables a body-possessing Jason (as seen in the ninth entry), a copycat killer posing as Jason (as seen in the fifth one), and departures from Crystal Lake entirely (the eighth one). Wherever he goes, we're just thrilled to see that the man behind the mask is back.
