Videos
[Video] Larry Zerner Completely Breaks Down Current State of the Messy ‘Friday the 13th’ Legal Issues
A whole lot has happened in the world of Friday the 13th this year, at least behind the scenes. And let’s face it. Most of us aren’t legal experts, so all the messiness has been quite confusing.
Enter Larry Zerner. In addition to playing beloved character Shelly in Friday the 13th: Part III, Zerner is also an entertainment lawyer who happens to specialize in copyrights (go figure, eh?!), and he’s really been our main source of continued clarification about the legal mess that the Friday the 13th franchise has spent the last couple years mired in. It’s Zerner, mostly through Twitter, who has made sense of all the confusion, boiling each new piece of information down to its essence and making it easy for us all to understand.
The most recent developments? A judge has ruled 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.
Subsequently, Friday the 13th director Sean Cunningham filed a notice of appeal, and then we soon thereafter learned that LeBron James is working on getting his hands into the franchise. So what’s the current state of everything going on, who exactly owns what, and how are things likely to play out from here? In a chat with Slash ‘n Cast, Zerner breaks it all down.
This is an *essential* watch, if you’re a big time Friday the 13th fan…
Moon Studios dropped a new trailer during the Sony State of Play for their dark action-RPG No Rest for the Wicked, while also hinting at the long-awaited launch window for the full 1.0 release. The game, which has been in Early Access on Steam since April 2024, will be launching this October in full for PlayStation 5 and PC via Steam, while versions for the Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch 2 will arrive at a later date.
As a token of appreciation for supporters new and old, Moon Studios is offering an exclusive Early Access Founder’s Pack, a free limited edition bundle available for anyone who purchases the game on Steam prior to July 10, with rewards unlocking when 1.0 officially launches. PlayStation 5 users can receive the Early Access Founder’s Pack by pre-ordering the game once available, any time before launch day.
The Founder’s Pack includes:
- A New Secret Hideout: Spirit Cavern – The legacy of Moon Studios now lives inside No Rest for the Wicked, exclusively for Founders. A hand-crafted home that bridges both worlds.
- Sayer’s Vow: An all new Sword in the stone reserved just for the founders that only early adopters can extract in the game world.
- A Custom Founders Tag ensures players are clearly identified as early adopters.
- As a Founder member, players will get access to an exclusive Public Beta Test Realm reserved just for them, even after the 1.0 game launch.
As for the full 1.0 release, it will be a massive expansion of the core experience, introducing a staggering 60+ hours of new content, a new horde mode, powerful new weapons, bosses and enemies, new areas and a completely reimagined class system.
In No Rest for the Wicked, players take on the role of a “Cerim,” a member of a holy order imbued with mysterious powers, tasked with destroying the Pestilence, an ancient plague that has begun to consume the island Isola Sacra, itself already the site of great political upheaval and death.