Fuller Talks “Crystal Lake” Rights, Budget

The “Friday the 13th” franchise is famous for various things, one of them being the legal quagmire the franchise has found itself in over the years with all sorts of court battles over rights.

Yesterday came the news that Bryan Fuller and A24 were teaming up on a “Friday the 13th” prequel series to be called “Crystal Lake” which they’re crafting for the Peacock streaming service.

Fuller, of course, created the acclaimed series “Hannibal ” which is also famously based on a horror property and which could only use certain elements from Thomas Harris’ source material due to rights issues.

Fuller has since spoken with Fangoria about the news and was asked what characters, locations and so forth from the existing “Friday the 13th” franchise he could use. Turns out he has some flexibility:

“Everything. We can use everything. We can go to Hell, we can go to space. That’s not to say that we will do those things … although if we do go 10 seasons, I will be lobbying hard to go to space.

A24 and Marc Toberoff, who is Victor Miller’s lawyer, have beautifully and excruciatingly assembled all of the Friday the 13th rights. As a streaming series, we have the rights to do everything underneath the Friday the 13th umbrella.

The movie rights are a completely different thing. They are tied up at New Line and are super, super messy and probably won’t be untangled anytime soon, but as far as us chickens in the television industry, uh, roost, we have access to anything and everything that Friday the 13th has done up until this point.”

Though the project has been dubbed a prequel series, Fuller says he’s taking the “Hannibal” approach in that it’s more of a “pre-remake-uel series” but couldn’t elaborate. He does say: “I think over the course of the series you will see many familiar manifestations of Jason!”

He also says that like “Hannibal,” expect this to have a bold visual look, and that’s a big reason they went with Peacock as they were given a “full-season commitment with a huge penalty if we don’t do a second season”, and they will get “roughly five times the per-episode budget that we had on Hannibal”.

Don’t expect it to hold back on the body count, with Fuller promising: “I think we’ll be dropping bodies every episode.” He also says he’s been laying out the first three seasons of the series but does promise if they get to ten seasons that: “I’m going to make a concerted effort to find a way to rationally and dramatically and, in some fashion, go to space.”