Reboots and remakes are a dime a dozen now in Hollywood, and Friday the 13th was intended to follow that same trajectory. Despite the fact that the 2009 remake earned largely negative reception, Paramount Pictures was gearing up to release a new re-telling starring one of cinema's most popular serial killers, Jason Vorhees. In fact, the new Friday the 13th reboot was only weeks away from shooting, but now there's word that the project has been scrapped altogether.
Only a few hours ago, Paramount announced that it was removing Friday the 13th off its schedule, meaning that it would no longer comes out in October later this year. Now THR has dropped the news that the studio has decided to cancel the reboot, informing director Breck Eisner and production company Platinum Dunes earlier today. There was no specific reason given for why Friday the 13th was cancelled, although the article does mention that the poor performance of fellow horror movie Rings likely played a role in the decision. Evidently the executives began to second-guess how Friday the 13th would do since it has the same audience and was also intended to restart a franchise. Even if such a decision hadn't been made, one of THR's sources from the reboot said that production wouldn't have been ready to go by March.
In terms of shooting, Friday the 13th was definitely behind schedule. No one had been cast yet (at least publicly) to play Jason Vorhees, so the original announcement about moving the reboot off its October 13 release date makes sense. However, the outright cancellation of the entire project comes as a surprise. Still, the critical and commercial of Rings is certainly a plausible reason for Paramount having cold feet about their Friday the 13th reboot. That being said, given how many Friday the 13th movies have come before this, I'm skeptical if this will be the last time that a studio decides they want to press the reset button on the franchise.
Although the Friday the 13th franchise kicked off in 1980, Jason Vorhees didn't become the main antagonist until the 1981 sequel. Since then, he's usually been the one terrorizing humanity, whether they're the teenagers at Crystal Lake or folks from the future (see 2001's Jason X for the latter one). He even had a dalliance with equally iconic horror villain Freddy Krueger in 2003's Freddy vs. Jason, a crossover which earned mixed reviews. Since this new reboot has been cancelled, that leaves the 2009 remake as Jason's last cinematic story...for now.
While the Friday the 13th reboot is now dead, 2017 still has plenty of highly-anticipated horror movies on the way, including Alien: Covenant, Amityville: The Awakening, the It remake and Saw: Legacy. Stay tuned to CinemaBlend for updates on those projects and more from the horror genre.
