The Big Picture
- The Friday the 13th franchise was a major success in the 1980s, but slowed down in the following decade before being rebooted in 2009.
- A legal battle over ownership of the franchise occurred between writer Victor Miller and director Sean S. Cunningham, with Miller ultimately winning the rights to the first film.
- A prequel TV series called Crystal Lake is in the works, which will take place before the events of the first film.
Horror in the 1980s was all about the slasher craze and the Friday the 13th franchise was king. From 1980 – 1989, an astonishing eight films about Camp Crystal Lake were pumped out. That slowed down after New Line Cinema bought the rights to the franchise from Paramount. Over the next decade, there would only be three Jason Voorhees-centered movies, and then the franchise sat dormant until the reboot in 2009, also called Friday the 13th. The 2009 entry was a success, making $91 million worldwide on a $19 million budget. It is the 12th entry in the series and the next would be the perfectly titled Friday the 13th Part 13. With how well the reboot was received, it was just a matter of time before it came to be. Almost a decade and a half later, we’re still waiting. So, what happened?
‘1980’s ‘Friday the 13th’ Put Its Own Spin on the Slasher Genre
With the success of John Carpenter’s Halloween in 1978, director Sean S. Cunningham decided to blatantly rip it off with his own slasher movie… 1980’s Friday the 13th. At first, all he had was a title with no story. Cunningham had written before, but directing is where he’d made his mark, with the ’70s spent going from directing sexploitation films to family sports comedies. Victor Miller was then brought in to write the screenplay for Friday the 13th. It wasn’t Miller’s first time working with Cunningham, as he wrote the director’s previous two films as well, Manny’s Orphans and Here Come the Tigers.
Those might not have not been big hits, but Friday the 13th sure would be. It was anything but a Halloween clone. It traded in suburbia for the woods of a summer camp, and its killer was a mystery. Rather than knowing exactly who we’re dealing with like Michael Myers in Halloween, Friday the 13th is a whodunit, resulting in a shocking reveal that a middle-aged woman named Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer) is the one killing off camp counselors as revenge for other counselors not paying attention, resulting in her young son Jason’s drowning decades before.
The Writer and Director of the Original ‘Friday the 13th’ Fought Over Ownership
Friday the 13th was a big hit, making nearly $40 million. That success meant sequels, with another one coming out the very next year. Miller wouldn’t be involved ever again in the franchise, but Cunningham stuck around, not as a director but as a producer of the later New Line Cinema films. There were no issues until decades later when Miller decided to fight for what he was owed. The way he saw it, as the writer of Friday the 13th, he deserved ownership, especially considering the Copyright Law of 1976, which said that an author of a work after 35 years can petition for a transfer of the copyright. It wouldn’t be that simple. Cunningham fought back, claiming to be the owner of Friday the 13th. His reasoning was that Victor Miller was nothing more than a work-for-hire writer. It was Cunningham’s idea, Miller simply was the employee hired to write it.
Who Won the ‘Friday the 13th’ Lawsuit?
Miller disagreed that he was a work-for-hire writer. According to his lawyer, the script was commissioned as part of a film, and there was never anything presented to Miller that said that the script was a work made for hire. Cunningham and the film’s producers said that Cunningham was behind every creative and financial decision and that a standard WGA form agreement would have shown Miller that he was Cunningham’s employee. In 2018, a U.S. District Court Judge ruled in favor of Victor Miller. He agreed that the screenplay for Friday the 13th wasn’t a made-for-hire work. It was his ruling that Miller was an independent contractor. This was a big win for Miller, but not the end of his fight, as Cunningham would quickly appeal.
The lawsuit thankfully came to a complete end in September 2021. It was here that the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held up Victor Miller’s win that he was an independent contractor and not an employee of Cunningham’s hired to write the screenplay. This meant that he reclaimed the rights to the Friday the 13th franchise. It wasn’t a complete win for Miller in regard to complete control of the direction of the franchise. Sean S. Cunningham kept control of the foreign rights for one. There was also one more key piece of information that didn’t make the next steps so clear.
What Does the Lawsuit Mean for the Future of ‘Friday the 13th’?
For a horror fan, you might think, okay, Victor Miller won, now get to making some more Friday the 13th movies! We miss Jason, bring him back! While Michael Myers was out there in another Halloween trilogy the last few years, the hockey-masked Jason Voorhees has been dormant. Finally, we’re going to get Friday the 13th Part 13 and more, right? Not so fast.
Sean S. Cunningham also kept control of the intellectual property from the Friday the 13th sequels. What does that mean? As Victor Miller only wrote the first movie, he only retained the intellectual property from that project. If Miller wanted to greenlight a movie called Friday the 13th about camp counselors getting killed at Camp Crystal Lake, so be it. There was just one major flaw though. Jason Voorhees is not in the original Friday the 13th film. As Ghostface will be happy to remind you, it was his mother, Mrs. Voorhees, who was the killer.
Miller owned the rights to Pamela Voorhees, so he could remake the first film if he liked, but it became murky as far as Jason goes. Could Victor Miller have a Friday the 13th film made with Jason Voorhees in it, when he’s not the one who created the character? Jason Voorhees is technically in the first movie, seen as a child in the dream sequence at the end that has him jumping out of the lake and attacking final girl Alice (Adrienne King). This was Jason as a child though, not the adult wearing the sack over his head or the hockey mask. Victor Miller may have created Jason, but not the one that has since become an icon.
What Will the ‘Friday the 13th’ Prequel Series ‘Crystal Lake’ Look Like?
Fittingly, on Halloween last year came a major announcement: Friday the 13th was coming back in 2024. It wouldn’t be as a feature film, however, but an A24 TV series for Peacock called Crystal Lake. Bryan Fuller of Hannibal fame would be the showrunner and executive producer, with Victor Miller serving as an executive producer as well. Even Kevin Williamson, the horror legend who wrote Scream, was going to come in and write an episode. But how did they get around the Jason rights? Well, Crystal Lake is a prequel series that will take place before the events of the first film. Even the star of the first film, Adrienne King, is somehow being brought back in a role. Jason can exist in this world as his child sel and his mother can be there as well. Still, that means no masked Jason, right?
It would seem that it is very clear that this series can’t have an adult Jason, and while Bryan Fuller and others have been tightlipped about exactly what Crystal Lake will be about, he did interestingly tell Fangoria, “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.” How can that be when Cunningham holds those rights?
Who knows what awaits Crystal Lake? Maybe there will be an adult Jason somehow, maybe Fuller is just teasing and there won’t be. At some point, we’ll find out more, but until we do, horror fans should be happy that we’re finally going back to Camp Crystal Lake after so many years away.
