Why a New Friday the 13th Movie Hasn't Been Greenlit

To date, there have been 12 theatrically released films made around the Jason Voorhees story arc. The wait for a 13th film, which in itself would be symbolically important and easy to market, has been a long one. The last 10 years have been full of false promises, unrealized visions and lots of vitriol. Additionally, the decade has enjoyed a renewed interest in the hockey mask-wearing horror icon. So, why has it been so difficult to bring Jason back to the big screen, and what's causing all the animosity?

The main roadblock to a new film is a dispute between the screenwriter of the original film, Victor Miller, and its director, Sean S. Cunningham, who currently holds the rights to the franchise with Horror Inc. and the Manny Company.

Miller (via 1976 US Copyright Act) filed to terminate the grant of rights to his script back in 2016. This practice protects artists who have little to no leverage when initially licensing their property, and it's designed to give them a chance to negotiate a better deal after having decades to see the scope of the work’s success. Before being allowed to reclaim the licensing rights, the artist must first wait 35 years. Usually, this results in renegotiation and financial compensation for the artist -- in this case, Miller. But that's not what happened.

Instead of renegotiating, Horror Inc. decided to sue Miller, alleging he had no claim to compensation since the movie was Cunningham's idea and that Miller was employed on a “work for hire” basis. This is where the dispute takes hold. Miller claims he was not work for hire, which would mean he was basically just shaping Cunningham's ideas into a filmable script, but that he instead wrote the script on his own.

So, who created what and what should happen now? Looking back, Miller was paid $9,200 for the screenplay. The movie grossed nearly $40 million dollars. Had the franchise ended there, perhaps Miller would have accepted what seems like a raw deal and moved on. But the movies continued, putting out 11 more installments and a slew of related merchandise and video games. The films alone have together grossed almost $400 million. With that kind of continued saturation, it's no wonder Miller felt he was owed a bit more of the pie.

In September of 2018, the court ruled in favor of Miller, the evidence showing Miller had given his script to Cunningham months before signing his employment contract, and, as a result, was entitled to terminate the rights. This ruling didn't make things all that much clearer in regards to the future of Jason Voorhees and Friday the 13th, though.

It was ruled that Miller would regain the rights to his original script in the United States, but Cunningham's group still has the rights internationally. This makes it hard to get anything done, especially since exactly how much of the franchise Miller has rights to is still sort of murky. To break it down, let's look back at the films and their most recognizable elements.

NEXT PAGE: Friday the 13th Has Been a Lot of Things Over the Years

The original Friday the 13th doesn't feel quite like the other movies in the series, with the identity of the killer remaining a mystery all the way up until the end. In the subsequent films, Jason Voorhees, who started off as a cautionary tale about a bullied kid who drowned at summer camp, is morphed into an unstoppable machine of death and mayhem. While Jason does appear briefly in the first film, popping out of the water for the final scare, no one at the theater back in 1980 could have predicted what he would become.

As the story goes, Pamela Voorhees was working as a cook at Camp Crystal Lake in 1957 when her 11-year-old son, Jason, supposedly drown, though his body was never recovered. Pamela, believing Jason to be dead, murders two counselors at the camp the following summer, resulting in its closure. She then spends the next 22 years making sure the camp remains shuttered, poisoning the water and committing several more murders along the way.

Cut to 1979, the summer depicted in the first film. After Mrs. Voorhees is eventually killed by Alice Hardy, we see Alice attacked by what appears to be an 11-year-old Jason. The viewer is led to believe this is just a dream once the police confirm they found no boy. However, in an ominous last line, Alice declares, "Then he's still there." Odds are she didn't know how right she was.

So, Miller's main contributions here are the establishment of Jason's backstory, his murderous mother and the setting at Camp Crystal Lake, along with some foreshadowing about his return. In the judge's ruling, Miller was not given rights specifically to use the "Friday the 13th" title, and while the backstory and setting are certainly important, we've seen them ignored in various entries since. Things like Jason's hockey mask didn't come into play until the third film, so that iconography would stay with Cunningham. Following the first movie, which would see both Cunningham and Miller exit all involvement through the rest of the Paramount run, things got continually stranger, the story moving further away from Miller's original concept.

When the second film starts up, just a couple of months later, Alice is killed by an adult-sized Jason Voorhees. This raises some questions: If that really was Jason at the end of the first film, how does he age so quickly in just a couple months? Or, if it was just a dream that Alice had, what had Jason been doing for the last couple of decades while his mother was avenging his assumed death? Regardless, it seems clear none of this is what Miller intended, so just minutes into Friday the 13th Part II, it would seem that the new filmmakers are already forging their own path.

Following Alice's murder, the timeline jumps forward five years, and in the summer of '84 Jason goes on a killing spree that spans three films but takes place over the course of only six days. From July 12-18, audiences witness the events of Part II, Part III and Part IV unfold. This includes the introductions of franchise staples Christine Higgins, Tommy Jarvis and legendary "final girl," Ginny Field. Throughout these first four films, Jason became a genre icon. Almost all of what happens does so totally independent of what Miller created. This is Victor Miller's Jason Voorhees in name only.

NEXT PAGE: The Lawsuit Hits an Unexpected Community: Gaming

From there, things continue to get crazier as the next four films unravel. In Part V, we see a red herring in paramedic Roy Burns, who poses as Jason to middling success. After the Fake Jason arc, Part IV has Tommy Jarvis inadvertently resurrect Voorhees through the power of lightning, giving the franchise a much more supernatural take. Over the next few movies, Zombie Jason takes on an entire police department, a telekinetic teenager and the sewers of New York City. Then, in 1993, he moves with Cunningham to New Line Cinema -- then to Hell, space and even into the dreamscape with Freddy Kruger.

The point being, by the time the New Line movies came around, they were about as far removed from a vengeful mother killing teens at a summer camp as you could get. Miller's script, which was the kicking off point, no longer felt as important to the Jason story, at least not for more than a background. And while the 2009 remake served as an amalgam of several of the previous movies rolled into one, it too skipped over almost everything from the original. In the years that followed, several projects were announced in the form of reboots, or even an origin about Jason's dad, but they all faltered, some due to this very lawsuit.

The most immediate ramification felt, though, was in the gaming community, where it was announced that, due to the lawsuit, no more DLC content or updates would be released for 2017's Friday the 13th: The Game. This is where a lot of that vitriol came from, as the misinformed lashed out at Miller. Death threats and the like were hurled at the writer and his wife, as many fans, not fully understanding the situation, assumed it was Miller suing to shut down the game, rather than Cunningham's group suing to avoid paying Miller.

Whichever side you land on, it's gotten ugly. It would have been great if the production companies simply paid Miller what he was owed, shared the wealth and maybe invited him back aboard for future projects. But at the same time, most of what fans want to see was established long after Miller's involvement had concluded, so it's understandable that Cunningham and company didn't want to pay out for something they felt they didn't owe. An appeal to the decision is expected.

However it turns out in the end, eventually Jason will return in some form, but unfortunately it's the fans that are losing out for now.