While a remake of “Friday the 13th” is still possible, Netflix’s “Fear Street” trilogy has significantly complicated the reboot of the slasher series. The Friday the 13th franchise has been out of business for more than a decade due to complex legal issues related to who owns the rights to the series. Like the 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, the critically acclaimed reinterpretation of Friday the 13th was still financially successful enough to generate interest in further sequels.
However, this led to a legal dispute between the producers, screenwriter and director of the original film about who owns which parts of the Friday the 13th brand. So it may be some time before Jason Voorhees returns to Camp Crystal Lake on the big screen. However, there is one thing that will not help the creators of the series “Friday the 13th” if they take up a remake in the near future – this is the success of the trilogy “Street of Fear” from Netflix.
Released in 2021, “Fear Street” has become a major event consisting of three interconnected slashers released weekly on Netflix. Not only does the second of these films, “Friday the 13th,” inspired by “Fear Street: 1978,” tell essentially the same story as most of the franchise’s sequels, but the second part of “Fear Street” tells the plot as part of a larger and more ambitious exciting film. the story is spread over three films. Thus, the film “Friday the 13th”, in which Jason kills the camp counselors, will most likely seem less tortuous and less complicated repetition of the hit “Streets of Fear” of 2021. However, this is not the only reason why the success of “Fear Street: 1978” may deprive the sails of any potential remake of “Friday the 13th.”
Fear Street: The 1978 Edge surpassed Jason Voorhees from “Friday the 13th”
Unlike the series that inspired the creation of the horror film of 2021, “Fear Street: 1978” was not afraid to kill children — and many of them. The Friday the 13th movies have always avoided this taboo for a good reason, which means that the slasher reboot is likely to be quieter than Netflix’s flagship horror. Fear Street: The cursed killer Tommy from 1978 killed a lot of camp counselors, but also fired their young wards (fortunately, mostly behind the scenes). On the contrary, Jason Voorhees was known to stand in a hut full of children at a campsite and did not aim his weapon at any of the children.
Most horror fans (even the most inveterate hounds) don’t like to see children’s characters being killed on the screen. Nevertheless, “Fear Street: 1978” handled the child deaths with surprising grace, showing only restrained glimpses of carnage and leaving most of the deaths behind the scenes — although older characters got a few impressive bloody deaths to compensate. However, “Fear Street: 1978” still raised the bar in terms of what slasher fans find shocking, which means that the comparatively old-fashioned “Friday the 13th” will have a harder time dropping its jaws if the franchise ever manages to produce a reboot or remake in the wake of the success of Fear Street.
