17 Years Later, An Iconic Horror Franchise Is Coming Back To Theaters
After almost two decades away, Jason Voorhees is coming back to terrify moviegoers.
Movie announcements can come at any time, but there are some dates that some franchises wait for: Star Trek has First Contact Day, Mario has March 10, and Star Wars has May the Fourth. But one fandom doesn’t have an annual holiday: Friday the 13th, the summer camp slasher that launched Jason Voorhees as a horror movie icon. Fridays that fall on the 13th of the month can happen whenever, but usually when one does, there’s some kind of announcement.
2026 was actually a pretty popular year for Fridays the 13th, and today marks the third and last one of the year. To celebrate, we just got the biggest Friday the 13th announcement in years.
This new movie marks the first Friday the 13th movie since the 2009 reboot starring Jared Padalecki.
According to Deadline, Friday the 13th is returning to theaters with a new movie, one that happens to be the 13th in the series, so it’s a big deal. This movie will mark the first Friday the 13th installment since 2009, when Marcus Nispel attempted to reboot the franchise as a whole. Unfortunately, the remake didn’t stick, and the franchise lay dormant until this year saw the release of Crystal Lake, the Friday the 13th prequel series at Peacock that told the backstory of Pamela and Jason Voorhees involving secret experimental procedures, gaslighting, and Hamish Linklater.
This new movie will be directed by Steve Miner, the director behind the original Friday the 13th sequels, Friday the 13th Part II and Part III. These were especially important movies to the greater franchise because of how they treated the villain, Jason. Part II brought him back after the first movie revealed the true perpetrator was Jason’s mom, Pamela, and Part III introduced one of the most recognizable horror movie getups in movie history: Jason’s iconic hockey mask disguise.
Steve Miner was the first director to put Jason Voorhees in a hockey mask.
The long wait was very much needed: Over the course of Friday the 13th’s many sequels, Jason has explored space, been the victim of a brain parasite, lived underwater, and many other strange happenings. Bringing back the director from the (relatively) more straightforward sequels suggests we’ll see a fresh start for the franchise, one that will hopefully be a bit more straightforward than the 2009 remake.
The real question, though, is how Crystal Lake will fit into all of this. While Pamela Voorhees may no longer be around, the series completely changed the origin of Jason as a character, and its still unclear how that fits into the greater canon. If Friday the 13th is really going to continue, it needs to find a way to get all of its spinoffs in a row.
