Jason Voorhees may have met his match. It’s the number 13. It’s been six years since the twelfth Friday the 13th film came out—and the forthcoming 13th sequel just got hit with another string of setbacks.
The Wrap reports director David Bruckner, who’d been on the project for over a year, has left. The reason? Variety reports writer Aaron Guzikowski (who wrote Prisoners) has just come on board to pen a new script and the producers, who include Michael Bay and his Platinum Dunes colleagues, didn’t feel it was fair for Bruckner to wait around while they waited on a new script.
It’s just the latest delay on this the 13th Friday the 13th film (that’s counting Freddy vs. Jason as #11), a movie that was originally expected to be released in 2013, for obvious reasons. It was then given a 2015 release date after Paramount traded the rights with Warner Bros., and then got bumped back again to 2016 and, most recently, to 2017. Friday January 13, 2017 to be exact. Bruckner came on in 2014 and several other writers have been attached along the way.
Since there’s a new script being written, we don’t know what the movie will be about. Jason will, obviously, be featured prominently but old rumors of it being a found footage movie are not true. One possibility though is a story that explores Jason’s immortality. Here’s producer Brad Fuller from an Esquire interview last year.
There’s always been this supernatural aspect to these movies. It defies logic that, you see Jason get killed in every movie, including ours, the 2009 one. And then he comes back and no one’s ever really investigated what that is. So that’s something that I think about a little bit. Like it is supernatural, but what is he? Those are the things that we’re toying with. Nothing has been decided. But those type of things: How does he always come back?
People traditionally want to understand exactly how and why things happen, and yet something so odd happens at the end of these movies and no one seems to question it. So people come to the movie with the expectation that the real villain will be killed and come back. And yet we never toyed with that notion….Those are the things that we’re asking ourselves. And we’ll see what comes of it.
However, that was an idea Fuller had been working on with Bruckner. Whether or not that’ll be what Guzikowski does, we’ll find out in 2017. Maybe. After all, this is lucky number thirteen.
Bonus: Bruckner has confirmed and is talking about the news a bit on Twitter.
Contact the author at germain@io9.com.