Jason [Blum] and I definitely agree that Friday the 13th is something we’d love to get our hands on. I really want to go back to basics. You don’t need too many ingredients for a movie in this series. You need summer camp, you need campers, and you need Jason Voorhees in a mask. Look, Halloween is the best slasher movie for me. But Friday the 13th is a franchise that I simply bow to. I just love everything about her. And if we could live in both worlds, like with Halloween , living in Crystal Lake for a while would be amazing.
– The Exorcist: Believer producer Ryan Turek said in Inverse
Complicated court process
Fortunately, the entire mythology of the Friday the 13th franchise doesn’t take place in purgatory, as Bryan Fuller is working on a Crystal Lake TV series for Peacock, but the specifics of the story come with the series’ complex history and legal issues on hand.
The legal dispute involves director Sean S. Cunningham and screenwriter Victor Miller. Cunningham hired Miller to write Friday the 13th , based largely on the name. The first film launched as many as 11 sequels and an extremely profitable franchise. The legal dispute centered over who owned the rights to elements of the series, including Jason Voorhees, the hockey mask killer.
Complicating matters is the fact that Jason was not the killer from the original film, and the iconic image of the undead killer was not fully established until the third installment. This means that until the matter is fully resolved, the film cannot use both the title Friday the 13th and the Jason Voorhees mythology, which would require the new film to use only one of those elements. Crystal Lake is an example – the place where the action of the original takes place. However, it does not directly refer to the well-known title or Jason Voorhees himself .