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Corey Feldman Lays Out Idea for His Return to the ‘Friday the 13th’ Franchise
With the recent news that Jamie Lee Curtis is returning to Halloween and Linda Hamilton is coming back to Terminator, it would seem that more and more franchises are making the smart decision to hit the reboot button while also returning to the original storylines that made us all fall in love with them in the first place.
If there’s any one iconic figure in the Friday the 13th franchise, other than Jason Voorhees, it’s of course Tommy Jarvis. Could he be the next to make a grand return?
Over the years, The Final Chapter star Corey Feldman has time and time again expressed a desire to bring back Tommy Jarvis proper – the character of course returned in the subsequent two films, played by different actors in each one – and in a new chat with Yahoo (via Movie Web), he laid out his idea for making that happen.
In short, he envisions his return as the Friday franchise’s version of Halloween H20.
“I’ve long had this vision of doing our own kind of H20. Which I thought would be great,” Feldman told the site. “Everyone seems to have this huge crush on the Tommy Jarvis character. People really got, I don’t know, into the concept about where Tommy is going. They tried to bring him back with three different movies. And every single one never panned out the right way. And yeah, that’s because it’s not Tommy Jarvis, it’s a guy playing Tommy Jarvis. But let’s get back to the roots. Same thing they did with H20.”
Feldman continued, “What would have happened if all those other movies were just some kind of bad nightmare? And the reality is that we last saw Tommy in the hospital room with his sister, and we think Jason is dead. You want to bring him back from that point, and continue the story thirty years later. Oh, my god, he still exists! That’s the movie I think everyone wants to see.”
According to Feldman, he once pitched this very idea to New Line.
“We actually got as far as the writer, great guy, he was on board, and he really wanted to do this. He was excited,” Feldman recalled. “Barney Cohen, he was the original writer from Part 4. He wanted to come back. His concept was, if you’re really going to do this, who else would you bring back? And I said, ‘You have to go to Frank Mancuso, and get him back in the game.’ As you know, he left the franchise years ago. And I think we should talk to Joe Zito, and get the original crew back together, and do it the right way. That was an idea we were floating.”
Ultimately, Platinum Dunes got hold of the franchise and decided to do a full-on reboot of the saga, resulting in the 2009 remake of the Friday the 13th series.
“At the end of the day, I don’t think fans were too gung-ho about that,” noted Feldman.
Sam Neill, the New Zealand actor best known for his role in 1993’s Jurassic Park, has passed away this week at 78 years old. In a statement shared on Neill’s Instagram page this morning, the actor’s family said that his passing was “sudden and unexpected.”
Neill had been diagnosed with a rare blood cancer in 2022, but stated the following year that he was in remission. The family notes that he “remained cancer free” at the time of his passing.
The family statement reads, “It is with immense sadness that the whānau of Sam Neill share the news of his passing on Monday 13th July, in Sydney Australia. Sam was surrounded by family and passed with the dignity that has characterised his whole life. The loss was sudden and unexpected but blessed by the fact that Sam remained cancer free.
“They would like to express their deepest gratitude to the staff at St Vincent’s Private Hospital for their incredible care. More details will be shared later, but for now, on behalf of the family, we ask that you respect their privacy as they navigate this immeasurable loss.”
In addition to his iconic role as Dr. Alan Grant in the original Jurassic Park and the sequels Jurassic Park III and Jurassic World: Dominion, Sam Neill left an indelible mark on the horror genre with memorable roles in Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession, The Omen: The Final Conflict, John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness, and sci-fi horror favorite Event Horizon.
Sam Neill’s vast resume in film and television began in the early 1970s and also includes the films Sleeping Dogs, Enigma, The Good Wife, A Cry in the Dark, Dead Calm, The Hunt for Red October, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, Hostage, The Jungle Book, Snow White: A Tale of Terror, The Horse Whisperer, Bicentennial Man, Daybreakers, Escape Plan, and Thor: Ragnarok.
Sam Neill is survived by his four children and eight grandchildren.
Steven Spielberg said in a statement to Variety, “I owe a debt of gratitude to Roger Donaldson, Gilliam Armstrong, Graham Baker and Phillip Noyce for casting Sam Neill in the roles in which he was so brilliant that brought him to my attention and led to his playing Dr. Alan Grant in Jurassic Park. Sam was exceptionally collaborative. It was a stretch for him to play a character who acted as though children were messy and smelly because this was the opposite of the loving father he was to his children. I adored making all the Jurassic movies with him.”
Spielberg adds, “Along with Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, we will always have our Jurassic family and Sam will never be forgotten by us or his many millions of fans around the world.”
Sam Neill in ‘Event Horizon’
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