Movies
[Exclusive] U.S. Rights to ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ Have Reverted Back to Wes Craven’s Estate
One of the biggest conversations in the horror community right now is the current state of the Friday the 13th franchise, which is trapped in a legal battle between two parties.
It all started when Friday the 13th writer Victor Miller exercised a legal right that would revert the ownership of the story back to him. Director Sean Cunningham’s Horror, Inc. however, refutes this, and that’s why we are where we are. While all of us were focusing on Friday, I checked in on the status of another iconic slasher, one who lays dormant in Springwood, OH.
What I discovered is that Wes Craven‘s Estate pulled a similar maneuver this year and regained the U.S. rights to both A Nightmare on Elm Street and its red and green sweater/fedora-wearing dream demon, Freddy Krueger. Long story short, the law is that writers can reclaim ownership of their work after 35 years, and 2019 marks 35 years since Elm Street was released. Like Victor Miller, Craven’s estate was, therefore, able to legally reclaim ownership of the original film this year, which was of course written and directed by the late Wes Craven.
The implications are unknown to me as I’m not a lawyer, but the good news is that there appears to be no third party standing in the way of Craven’s estate from making deals for the franchise or the iconic slasher. In other words, there’s no current legal battle over the rights, allowing Craven’s estate control over the franchise’s future here in the States. From what I understand, WB/New Line Cinema still controls international rights, much like Friday the 13th.
More as we learn it.
It was announced two years ago that filmmaking team Radio Silence (Ready or Not, Scream, Scream VI, Abigail) were working on bringing Snake Plissken back to the screen for a brand new movie based on John Carpenter’s Escape from New York for 20th Century Studios, with John Carpenter himself on board as an executive producer of the upcoming movie.
The project had originally been described as a “reboot,” but filmmakers Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett had described it as more of a “requel.” Unfortunately, the pair revealed to Comicbook.com that they’re no longer developing the requel and have parted ways with the project.
Gillett told the outlet, “We are not, unfortunately. I think titles like that bounce around for a while and I think they’ve tried to get that out of the blocks a few times. I think it’s just ultimately a tricky rights issue thing. There’s a clock on it and we just weren’t in a position to make the clock, ultimately. But who knows? I think, in hindsight, it feels crazy that we would think we would, post-Scream, step into a John Carpenter franchise. You never know. There’s still interest in it and we’ve had a few conversations about it but we’re not attached in any official capacity.”
Escape from New York was set in 1997. “When the U.S. president crashes into Manhattan, now a giant maximum security prison, a convicted bank robber is sent in to rescue him.”
In Escape from LA, also directed by John Carpenter, “Snake Plissken is once again called in by the United States government to recover a potential doomsday device from Los Angeles, now an autonomous island where undesirables are deported.”
Radio Silence is fresh off of helming gory vampire movie Abigail. It’s the third vampire movie from the Universal Monsters brand in the past year, the film scaring up $34.7 million at the worldwide box office these past few weeks. That gives it a higher worldwide gross than both The Last Voyage of the Demeter ($21.7 million) and Renfield ($26.4 million), and it’s also the most critically successful of the three vampire movies. Abigail also just landed on Premium VOD, so you can watch at home now.
Stay tuned for additional details on the Escape from New York requel, and what’s next for Radio Silence.
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