When the Friday the 13th remake was released in 2009 to pretty good numbers at the box office, it was pretty much assumed that sequels would follow. However, six years later, Jason has yet to return. In a new interview with producer Brad Fuller, we found a little bit more about why that is and what we can expect from the new movie.
Esquire sat down with Fuller to discuss the future of the Friday the 13th franchise. First of all, Fuller thankfully squashed the rumor that the new movie would be found footage in the style of Paranormal Activity.
Making the new movie found-footage would have likely been done to cut costs, and this is really why we haven’t seen much of Jason recently. As the Esquire article discusses, with the rise of low budget movies like Paranormal Activity making huge amounts of money at the box office, studios became less willing to spend a whole lot on horror. Why fund a $20 million Friday the 13th movie when they could fund a $100,000 Paranormal Activity type movie and make the same amount of money?
However, Fuller said the new movie will not be victim to budget slashing, saying that they hope to fall somewhere in the sweet spot between a $2-3 million movie like The Purge and a $20 million movie like 2009’s Friday the 13th.
Fuller also revealed a bit more about the plot of the movie itself. Though they still seem to be pretty early in the development process, he said the movie might toy with the idea of Jason’s immortality, exploring why exactly he’s able to come back to life in every single movie despite usually being killed at the end of the previous one. Esquire compared this to the series possibly getting its own version of Dr. Loomis from the Halloween movies, a character who would be trying to look into what’s happening with Jason, and Fuller approved of that comparison.
On the one hand, this would definitely be a fresh new direction to take the franchise in, and maybe the one thing a new Friday the 13th could do that has never been done in the series before. On the other hand, do we really need an explanation as to why Jason always comes back? Isn’t not knowing part of what makes him so scary? It could be a cool idea if done right, but sometimes fully explaining something like this just makes it less interesting and scary. If we’re going with the Halloween comparison, let’s not forget that as the sequels went on, that series attempted to explain more and more about Michael Myers and his past and things just got dumber and dumber.
Either way, Fuller sounds extremely passionate about the movie and so it seems like the series is in good hands. He assured fans the movie would cover all the basics that we’d want out of a movie like this, taking place at Camp Crystal Lake and hitting all the notes of a Friday the 13th. It’s still not totally clear if this is a reboot or a direct sequel, but the fact that Fuller talks about Jason always coming back to life seems to imply this movie might be in some way connected to the previous one, or at least that this movie won’t be completely starting over with a brand new Jason.
The currently untitled Friday the 13th sequel will be directed by David Bruckner, who previously directed The Signal as well as the segment “Amateur Night” from V/H/S. The movie is scheduled to be released on May 13, 2016.