It was way, way, way back in 2009 when Jason Voorhees returned to the big screen in the Friday the 13th remake from director Marcus Nispel, which essentially rolled the first three original Friday the 13th movies into one and allowed the masked slasher to get back to the basics of what he does best: brutally killing horny young men and women out in the woods.
We had no idea at the time, of course, that it would be the last time for another nearly twenty years that we’d see Jason Voorhees or Friday the 13th back up on the screen again.
The franchise had been stuck in legal limbo for the past several years, with new installments in the Friday the 13th franchise unable to get off the ground while things were being worked out behind the scenes. Long story short, original Friday the 13th writer Victor Miller won the rights to that original movie’s screenplay in a legal battle with director Sean Cunningham, splitting up the franchise rights and making a massive mess of the whole situation.
Truth be told, it seems like nobody is 100% clear on who owns what and who can do what, but the two main players here are Victor Miller and Horror Inc.’s newly launched Jason Universe, the rights holders of the other Friday the 13th elements. With those two forces working together, A24 and Peacock’s upcoming prequel series “Crystal Lake” was able to take shape.
Long story short? As far as we can tell, Peacock’s “Crystal Lake” can do whatever it wants with the Friday franchise, a dream for fans who have been waiting 17 YEARS for Jason Voorhees to return to the screen. The movie rights are a bit of a different story, from what we understand, but the series will finally allow Jason Voorhees to emerge from Crystal Lake later this year.
As we just learned this morning, A24’s “Crystal Lake” from showrunner Brad Caleb Kane will premiere Thursday, October 15, 2026 on the Peacock streaming service.
Callum Vinson (“Chucky”) is playing young Jason in “Crystal Lake,” which will tell the origin story of the masked slasher who has stalked the grounds of Crystal Lake for decades.
Linda Cardellini stars as Pamela Voorhees, a mother who gave up a singing career to raise her special needs child, only to take a dark turn when she loses her son — Jason.
But how long has it truly been since the last time we saw Jason on screen? Not counting last year’s Angry Orchard vignette Sweet Revenge from the Jason Universe team, it will have been 17 YEARS, 8 MONTHS since 2009’s Friday the 13th when “Crystal Lake” premieres on Peacock on October 15, by far the longest stretch of time ever between Friday the 13th projects.
The previous longest stretch of time between Friday the 13th movies was 8 years, 8 months. I know this because I’ve dedicated myself to keeping track for the past several years on Twitter.
What can we expect from “Crystal Lake”? Brad Caleb Kane recently told Entertainment Weekly in an interview, “In many ways, it’s a psychological thriller. It’s a paranoid ’70s thriller.”
He continued, “It has all of the DNA of a slasher without quite being a slasher. There are rivers of blood in the show. There are very, I think, ingenious kill sequences and deaths and murders, but it’s all done in service of character and theme and place and time.”
Stay tuned for much more on Jason’s return in “Crystal Lake.”
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