CW Picking Up ‘Friday the 13th’ Series

A Friday the 13th series is being developed at The CW by Steven Long Mitchell and Craig Van Sickle (The Pretender).

The series will have a direct tie to Jason Voorhees, unlike the 1980’s Friday the 13th: The Series (which had no tie whatsoever to the move series). Long Mitchell told the site, “I don’t think we really wanted to do a show about a guy with a machete chasing girls in tube tops. We couldn’t do that on a weekly basis… So what ends up happening is, a cop comes into town, looking for his brother. He realizes his brother was there searching into the past murders, and realizes that his personal story is tied into Jason’s personal story.”

He goes on to add the series will have some meta-universe aspects, saying, “What we’re going to do is basically acknowledge that the people came to this town after these killings happened, and they made all these movies. And now the town has a stigma. Our show is, ‘Here’s the true story. Here’s the real story of Jason.’ It’s been taken and exploited. So we have the young crowd who doesn’t know who he is except for what they’ve seen in the movies. The older crowd is afraid of him. We have a lot of people who have scars from him. The underlying thematic of the whole thing is that Jason is a monster in this town. He openly wears a mask. But everybody in this town wears a mask. Underneath those is the monster.”

Right now no casting or timeline has been announced. What do you think of this new take on the Friday the 13th franchise?