Platinum Dunes trio Michael Bay, Andrew Form and Brad Fuller are intent on making this next reboot of Friday The 13th really count. The company’s 2009 version fared well at the box office with a $91 million return on a $40 million budget, but failed to make a dent with fans. So, what better way to inject a new lease of life into a 30-year old franchise than grabbing ahold of fresh meat?
Enter Nick Antosca. Hot off the back of a two season writing stint on NBC’s Hannibal, the scribe has now joined the project to punch up the script. It’s not known if he will work from previous drafts by Richard Naing and Ian Goldberg, but earlier this month, Fuller spoke out about the decision to seek out new writers as a way to revitalize the story. Along with Bay and Form, the production trio are aiming for an entirely new approach to the exhausted franchise, which suggests that Naing and Goldberg’s scripts might not have been ‘fresh’ enough.
By addressing a core element of the Jason Voorhees mythology, namely his immortality, Fuller mentioned that “the new movie could play with established mythology or a different time frame in Jason’s life.” Specifically, the matter of Jason’s inability to stay dead no matter how many times he’s shot, stabbed, bludgeoned or minced. It raises an interesting aspect of horror movie watching; do we watch simply for the scares and gore, or do we want to know why killers never stay dead? After three decades without an answer to that latter question, we may finally be treated to a backstory that involves the real reason behind Jason’s reluctance to die.
Friday The 13th opens on May 13th, 2016.