CW to Develop FRIDAY THE 13TH
At the Television Critics Association press junket, CW network president Mark Pedowitz announced that the network is developing a new version of Friday the 13th.
Not the series. The movie franchise.
Steve Mitchell & Craig Van Sickle, creators of the 1996 NBC series The Pretender, will develop the show through CBS TV Studios. They’re just the latest additions to a team that includes Sean S. Cunningham, who directed the original 1980 film, producers Randall Emmett and George Furla of Emmett/Furla/Oasis Films, and producer Mark Canton.
The project kicked off last year when EFO and Crystal Lake Entertainment inked a deal to produce a new hour-long series based on the franchise. The new show will be a horror/crime thriller focused on a detective’s ongoing search for his missing brother, with the mystery somehow connected to Jason Vorhees, who’s returned to Crystal Lake to wreak havoc on the town. An earlier version of the script by Bill Basso and Jordu Schell had Jason in multiple time periods.
For those wondering: yes, there was a Friday the 13th: The Series that ran from 1987 to 1990 in first-run syndication. However, it was more like Warehouse 13 than Friday the 13th, and had no connection with the film franchise, although there were members of the cast and crew who crossed over from one to the other.
Friday the 13th: The Series followed antique shop owners Michelle “Micki” Foster and Ryan Dallion as they chased around the globe with their friend Jack Marshak searching for cursed antiquities they could then store in a secure location where they would no longer be a danger.
No schedule is set for the new Friday the 13th, nor have any announcements been made as to cast.
