Largely due to a decades-long legal dispute between Friday the 13th screenwriter Victor Miller and director Sean Cunningham, we haven’t seen a new Friday the 13th movie since 2009’s criminally underrated reboot. To make matters worse, the 2017 multiplayer horror game Friday the 13th: The Game got ensnared in the lawsuit and was unceremoniously shut down at the end of 2024.
Thankfully, the legal battle has come to an end, and while I won’t bore you with too much of the details, essentially, Miller owns the rights to the original screenplay while Cunningham holds the rights to the iconic Jason Voorhees character as we know him today, because only his child form was seen in the original 1980 Friday the 13th.
As the horror gods would have it, that character is now the sinister face of the Jason Universe, which was fully unveiled in a new video featuring music from Harry Manfredini, who composed most of the Friday the 13th movies and Friday the 13th: The Game.
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This is also the first new official cinematic Jason mask revealed since 2009, and the “machete metal” logo is also new. I will say, I’m not particularly impressed with either of those things, and I’m uneasy about turning a series that started out as a cheap, sleazy Halloween ripoff into a Marvel-style cinematic universe, but my excitement for new Jason cleanly trounces that trepidation.
So, what is the Jason Universe? Well, according to production company Horror Inc., it’s “a new era of the Friday the 13th franchise.” Right now, all we know about this new era is the Friday the 13th prequel TV series headed to Peacock, which just recently entered production, but the word “universe” definitely suggests a future full of Jason-related movies, TV shows, and potentially games and comics as well.
As far as the film series, there was once a sequel to the reboot in development, but it got canceled due to, you guessed it, legal drama. It’s also worth noting that Cunningham himself teased a “13th” movie back in 2022, but we haven’t heard a peep from him about it since.
It seems inevitable that we’ll get a new movie at some point now that the rights issues have been resolves, and, with 12 Jason movies in existence today, it would seem downright cruel for the rights holders to deprive us of a 13th Friday the 13th movie. Imagine the fun they would have coming up the title alone.
You won’t find Jason in our list of the best horror movies, but he holds a very special place in my heart.
