As always, let’s quickly recap where we are and how we got here…
After exercising his legal rights, a judge ruled last year that writer Victor Miller is the sole owner of the original Friday the 13th screenplay (in the United States only, oddly enough), but the judge declined to make a ruling on who currently owns the character of “adult Jason Voorhees,” who of course didn’t actually appear within the franchise until the second film.
The rights are split, and the two sides haven’t come to any agreements – Miller, the original film’s writer, and Sean Cunningham + Horror Inc., the film’s director and the franchise’s producer. Long story short, new Friday/Jason movies cannot be made until a deal is reached.
Subsequently, Friday the 13th director Sean Cunningham filed a notice of appeal, which was withdrawn for technical reasons but later reinstated. More recently, a mediation between the parties was held, with no settlement reached. The latest update comes, as always, from Part 3 star/entertainment lawyer Larry Zerner today, who tweeted the following:
“Sean Cunningham filed his opening appellate brief in Horror, Inc. v. Miller this morning. What does this mean? Let’s just say the chances of an early settlement just went way down.”
Zerner notes that he will have a full breakdown later today on his Twitter account, but the gist here is that Cunningham and Horror Inc. are asking the Second Circuit to reverse last year’s decision and take the original Friday the 13th‘s ownership rights away from Victor Miller. They believe that the implications of the initial ruling could be devastating to the film industry.
“If upheld, the district court’s decision threatens to undermine both the ability of screenwriters to collectively bargain and the expectations of employers that have engaged in collective bargaining for nearly a century, almost certainly leading employers to challenge whether the WGA can continue to organize and collectively bargain on behalf of screenwriters,” the company wrote.
The argument continues to be that Miller wrote the screenplay as a “work-for-hire,” and therefore never should’ve been able to gain rights to the screenplay in the first place. The trial judge had ruled that the rights go to Miller after all these years under the Copyright Act’s termination right, which allows authors to regain rights to work they signed over to a company.
Sadly, it looks like we’re no closer to this whole mess being sorted out.
