Back when Paramount and Warner Bros. reached a deal where the rights to Friday the 13th would go back to their 80s home (in a deal so Warners could get a slice of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar), it was heavily rumoured that this new reboot would be a found footage movie. While that has since been denied, the film’s producers Brad Fuller and Andrew Form have been talking to Collider about why it’s taken so long for this latest reboot to get underway and what happened to the found footage movie.
“At one point, the studio wanted us to make a found-footage version of [the 2009 Friday the 13th reboot] and that was deeply concerning to us because we didn’t think we could execute the movie in the right way if it was a found-footage movie,'” they said. “Jason is a POV movie. So, it was very hard to wrap our head around how you would do a Friday the 13th that was found footage, knowing that we really need the Jason perspective of watching. We didn’t want to break the DNA of that.”
The producers also discussed the various versions of the reboot that have been in development, including a sequel to the 2009 reboot. “We also battled: do we do a sequel to the original? Do we pick up where we left off with Jared and Amanda at the end of the movie? Somehow, that didn’t find a home,” they admitted.
However, after many, many push backs (it was originally meant to hit cinemas on March 3rd, 2015, but was pushed back to November 6th, 2015 and then delayed again until May 13th, 2016 before being delayed further), they’ve revealed that the latest reboot will shoot next year. “It will be eight years since we made the last one,” they said. “I’m here to say that we found the location. We have found the lake, we have found the camp. We found an amazing script by Aaron Guzikowski. Breck Eisner is directing the movie. That movie is shooting in early Spring.”
Originally published October 26, 2016. Updated April 13, 2018.
