Platinum Dunes Producers Give Update on Friday the 13th Franchise

Platinum Dunes’ Andrew Form and Brad Fuller spoke with Bloody Disgusting and gave an update on the status of the Friday the 13th franchise. The long-running horror series was scheduled to get a reboot, but the film pulled off Paramount’s schedule last February and production was shut down before filming began. The film was to be directed by Breck Eisner (The Crazies) with a script by Aaron Guzikowksi (Prisoners), but seems unlikely to move forward after the writer of the original film, Victor Miller, filed a lawsuit attempting to regain ownership of the franchise.

“One of the biggest heartbreaks of the last couple years was that we were about to make that movie and it fell apart. That still hurts,” Fuller told JoBlo.com. “The fans reach out to us; Andrew doesn’t really engage because he’s not on Twitter, but I am and I hear from the fans and that’s all they ask about. We get asked about that more than anything else.”

He added, “Fans think it’s so simple, that if we want to make the movie we can go make it, and that’s just not the case. There are rights issues; originally, Warner Bros. owned the rights, then Paramount had them for a couple of years, and now I think the rights are reverting back to Warner Bros. At the same time, there’s this on-going lawsuit with Victor Miller. If there’s a lawsuit hanging over the rights, it’s problematic, you can’t really make the movie until that gets settled. And now the movie is at New Line, and we’ve made a lot of movies with those guys, but that’s not our home studio anymore…So the question is, [does New Line] want to make the movie with us? If they want to make that movie with us, we will drop what we’re doing to make that movie. We had such a great experience making Friday the 13th, it was a dream come true to watch those movies as a kid and then be a part of it. So I don’t really have a clear answer.”

Form echoed regarding the abandoned film, “That one still hurts every day. We were a couple of weeks from filming on that one, Guzikowski wrote an unbelievable script, we found the camp… That one still hurts.”