Bryan Fuller has scored a straight-to-series order from Peacock for a prequel series set in the Friday the 13th universe. It comes from A24.

The move follows a fascinating legal battle between the team behind the original horror film.

Crystal Lake comes from Star Trek: Discovery co-creator Bryan Fuller, who has been developing a Friday the 13th project, originally as a feature film, since 2013. He will serve as writer, showrunner and exec producer.

A24 is the studio, while Victor Miller, who wrote the original screenplay of the 1980 movie, Marc Toberoff, Miller’s copyright attorney, and Rob Barsamian, who produced the original movie, will exec produce.

It’s worth remembering that Mrs. Vorhees was the original camp killer, a fact that Drew Barrymore’s character in the original Scream film would have been wise to have known.

The original Friday the 13th movie, which starred Betsy Palmer, Adrienne King, Laurie Bartram and Kevin Bacon, follows a group of teenage camp counselors who are murdered at summer camp.

Palmer plays Mrs. Vorhees who initially kills a pair of counselors in 1959 at Camp Crystal Lake after her son, Jason, supposedly drowned, before going on a murder spree in 1979 when a group tries to reopen the camp. Jason turns up at the end to attempt to kill King’s Alice after she killed his murderous mother.

It was directed by Sean Cunningham.

Full details of the plot of the series are being kept under wraps but the legal battle, which was decided in September 2021 may shed some light on what can and can’t appear.

The case, which was decided by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and you can read here, saw Miller win the rights to the character that he created after a copyright termination battle. The producers of the original film – Horror Inc., which includes Barsamian, had argued that Miller’s involvement was work for hire but a judge ruled that it wasn’t.

The case meant that Miller is now able to license a prequel series. The fact that Barsamian is one of the exec producers alongside Miller, suggests that a deal has been worked out between the groups.

It’s been suggested by sources that this also opens the door for future feature films in the franchise.

Whether this means that the team behind the series can use Jason’s famous hockey mask, which didn’t show up until Friday the 13th: Part III is unclear. Jason does show up at the end of the first film, as seen above.

There are also question marks as to the international release of such a project, as outlined in the case. Given that Peacock is only in the U.S. that is perhaps not an immediate issue, but whether it can be sold to or air on broadcasters outside of the States is unclear.

Crystal Lake is not the first television series based on the classic horror franchise. Friday the 13th: The Series aired for three seasons in syndication between 1987 and 1990 from Frank Mancuso Jr. and Larry B. Williams. The series, which followed a pair of owners of a cursed antiques store, does not feature Jason or any characters from the films.

Deadline also revealed in 2014 that Emmett/Furla/Oasis Films and Cunningham’s Crystal Lake Entertainment were developing a series with Cunningham exec producing alongside Power exec producer Mark Canton with Barsamian also producing, but that project never made it to air.

Bryan Fuller said, “I discovered Friday the 13th in the pages of Famous Monsters magazine when I was 10 years old and I have been thinking about this story ever since. When it comes to horror, A24 raises the bar and pushes the envelope and I’m thrilled to be exploring the camp grounds of Crystal Lake under their banner. And Susan Rovner is simply the best at what she does. It’s a pleasure and an honor to be working with her again.”

“Friday the 13th is one of the most iconic horror franchises in movie history and we were dying to revisit this story with our upcoming drama series Crystal Lake,” added Susan Rovner, Chairman, Entertainment Content, NBCUniversal Television and Streaming. “We can’t wait to get to work with Bryan Fuller, a gifted, visionary creator who I’ve had the pleasure of being a longtime friend and collaborator, along with our incredible partners at A24, in this updated version for Peacock that will thrill long-standing fans of the franchise.”

Yesterday, the news broke that Bryan Fuller (Hannibal, Queer for Fear, Pushing Daisies) and A24 would be bringing a Friday the 13th prequel series, to be called Crystal Lake, to NBCUniversal's streaming service, Peacock. As you can imagine, this announcement went off like a bombshell within the horror community. It's a series rather than a movie? And a prequel, at that? Would Jason Voorhees even be in this thing?

Well, as it happens, Bryan Fuller is a regular guest on THE KINGCAST, the Stephen King-themed podcast I host for the FANGORIA Podcast Network, and I knew if I wanted to get some straight answers on what he and his collaborators might be planning for Crystal Lake, the easiest (and, quite frankly, most reliable) thing to do would be to give him a ring.

And so, without further ado, here's what he was able to share on the record.

FANGORIA: The rumor mill was churning within seconds of the Crystal Lake news dropping, and I figured I'd just come straight to the horse's mouth to get some answers.

Bryan Fuller: (making horse noises; neighing and such)

Excellent. So, for starters, what characters and locations and whatnot are you allowed to use from the Friday the 13th franchise?

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.

(Laughs)

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.

This has been pitched as a prequel series, so how far back in the timeline will we be when Crystal Lake begins?

I don't think I'm allowed to say just yet, but I would say it's less a prequel series than a ... pre-remake-uel series.

Can you describe what "pre-remake-uel" means in this context?

For now, no. Not on the record, I can't.

Very well. But denoting it, even in part, as a prequel would tend to indicate that the series will revolve more around Pamela Voorhees than Jason. Will Jason be in it?

I wouldn't count Jason out.

OK, but you could be dancing around this. Could be that "Jason" is in it, but he's a kid rather than the masked killer everyone's imagining.

I think over the course of the series you will see many familiar manifestations of Jason!

Fair enough! I saw a bit of eyerolling yesterday on social media about the fact that Crystal Lake will be a prequel series, so I'm wondering what you have to say to anyone who's questioning that particular aspect of the show.

The reactions I saw yesterday were very positive, but yeah, there's always gonna be a collection of naysayers. That's nothing new to me! I encountered this when Hannibal was announced. Some of those tweets looked like copy-and-paste jobs from 10 years ago. So, part of me is sorta leaning back with my arms across my chest saying, "Wait and see," and the other part is more like, "Well, folks like that may not have to make a living with their imaginations and what they can imagine must be very disappointing to them."

Pamela Voorhees is clearly a very important character to you - you've dressed up as her before, for Halloween! - and I'm wondering if you can tell me why that is?

I'll tell you something very personal, and I may have shared this with you previously. I know part of this story has been out in the public discourse - as public a figure as I am, which is not very, but some people will have heard this: I read [a detailed plot synopsis for] Friday the 13th when I was maybe nine or 10, in Famous Monsters Magazine. This was a few years before I saw the movie! It became a story I'd tell my friends around campfires, which is also where I got my first taste of storytelling and the thrall an audience can fall under when it's hearing a story as captivating as that of Friday the 13th.

So there was that, combined with the fact that - at the same time - I was working with special needs kids. I was hyper-aware of the challenges of parenting special needs children. One of the kids I sat with during most of that volunteer work, his mother simply couldn't handle him. He was amazing and unique and had a different sort of intelligence, but he was also non-verbal. His mother couldn't get far enough away from him. And so, when I read about Friday the 13th and saw the lengths Pamela Voorhees would go to for her special needs child, I found myself in this Venn diagram of influences, and I fell in love with the series. I fell in love with the first movie, I fell in love with the second movie, I fell in love with all of them - well, maybe not Jason Goes to Hell, but I'm not mad at it. At any rate, I feel that I'm in a unique space to tell this story and to make sure it is loved and cared for appropriately.

Everything you've done for television to this point has had a bold look - I mean, consider Hannibal, just for starters. Can we expect Crystal Lake to also have a similarly distinctive look?

Yes. One of the things that is super exciting and one of the many reasons that we went with Peacock is that they blew every other competitor out of the water. There was a bidding war on this, and they came in strong and gave us a full-season commitment with a huge penalty if we don't do a second season. So it's kind of a two-season commitment (laughs), but really just the first-season commitment. We're going to have roughly five times the per-episode budget that we had on Hannibal.

That kinda money buys a lot of machetes.

We also have the creative support of Susan Rovner, who is hands down the best television executive that I've ever worked with; she was the executive on Pushing Daisies and shepherded it into its final form. I've been dying to work with her again for 15 years, and we finally worked it out! Her excitement about this, combined with understanding the different emotional pressure points that I have as an audience member who worked with special needs kids (and who also had a serial killer as a camp supervisor*), well, I think it will all work in concert to spin this version of Friday the 13th on its axis a bit. It will absolutely be recognizable for the hardcore Friday the 13th fans, but will also have an appeal to people who are simply interested in top-shelf TV storytelling.

Final question: how murderous is Crystal Lake gonna be? I'm sure you're not aiming for a particular, per-season kill count, but a certain amount of slashing must be on your mind.

It will be pretty murderous! I think we'll be dropping bodies every episode, and I think there's something about the build of that, as we are hopefully in for the long haul. I wasn't kidding: if we get 10 seasons, I'm going to make a concerted effort to find a way to rationally and dramatically and, in some fashion, go to space. I can't imagine it going 10 seasons, but I will put that out there that, uh ... well, I haven't gotten past laying out the first three seasons, honestly, so I suppose it's very easy for me to say, yeah, if we get to 10 seasons, we're going to space. Wait and see!

Special thanks to Bryan Fuller for letting us pester him over the phone about Crystal Lake.

Also, regarding that * : Fuller tells that whole story (which is truly bizarre and must be heard to be believed) on this episode of THE KINGCAST.

After 14 years, the Friday the 13th franchise is finally getting set to return to the screen with “Crystal Lake,” an upcoming prequel series from A24, Peacock and Bryan Fuller (“Hannibal”) that’s miraculously able to use any and all existing elements from the franchise.Peacock has given the project a straight-to-series order, with “Crystal Lake” being described as an “expanded prequel” to the original Friday the 13th franchise.

Variety had detailed, “The show will be written by Bryan Fuller, who is also the showrunner and an executive producer. Victor Miller, who penned the original film in the franchise, will also executive produce along with Marc Toberoff, Rob Barsamian, and A24.”

At a Friday the 13th Part III screening last night, Fuller provided an exciting update on the project, announcing that Kevin Williamson (Scream, Sick) will be writing an episode!

Additionally, original Friday final girl Adrienne King will have a recurring role!

Eric Goldman tweets from the screening, “They officially start writing in 2 weeks. It will have two scores to choose from – a modern one and a classic Manfredini one. Kevin Williamson is writing an episode. Adrienne King will have a recurring role.”

“Fuller has pitched four seasons for Crystal Lake. Only one officially ordered so far though he notes Peacock would have to pay a pretty hefty penalty if they didn’t order a Season 2,” Goldman’s thread continues. “Asked if he can confirm Pamela’s role in the Crystal Lake series, Fuller replied “We’re honestly going to be covering it all. The series is covering the life and times of these two characters” (presumably he’s referring to Pamela and Jason there!).”

Inside the Drowning of ‘Crystal Lake’: How Unpaid Writers, Inexperienced Execs and Questionable Bookkeeping Undid the ‘Friday the 13th’ Series
TheWrap spoke to more than a half-dozen insiders intimately involved in the planned $85 million Peacock series, A24’s first major foray into IP


It was late April and “Crystal Lake” was starting to attract A-list talent.

Charlize Theron was eyed to play Pam Voorhees in the A24 show based on the beloved “Friday the 13th” horror franchise, set in the immediate aftermath of the drowning of a young Jason Voorhees.

A $300,000 deposit on soundstages in Canada had already been placed. Directors like Vincenzo Natali and Kimberly Peirce were earmarked to direct episodes. Kevin Williamson, who wrote Wes Craven’s “Scream,” was set to write what was described as the show’s “Red Wedding” – referring to the infamous “Game of Thrones” episode – set entirely on a frozen Crystal Lake, with the summer camp’s cabins trapped under snow drifts. “I had packed for being away for seven months,” said one member of the “Crystal Lake” team.

Suddenly the hammer dropped on an $85 million show that A24 was producing for Universal’s direct-to-consumer streaming platform Peacock — the first piece of IP A24 has tackled in the studio’s pivot to more commercial projects, as TheWrap first reported last year.

Two days after a notes call with Peacock where one of the streamer’s executives said the pitch was “exactly what we want to hear,” A24’s head of television Sam French and A24 partner Ravi Nandan abruptly fired showrunners Bryan Fuller and Jim Danger Gray, according to an individual with knowledge of the conversation. Production on the show had been slated to begin in three months.

A24 had produced hit TV series before — including “The Curse” and “The Sympathizer,” along with “Euphoria,” “Beef” and “Ramy.”

And this decision— which effectively halted development on what was meant to be the first new piece of “Friday the 13th” visual media, aside from some video games, since New Line Cinema released the feature film remake in 2009 — shocked those close to the series.

So what the hell happened?

“Crystal Lake” was plagued by inexperienced production executives making questionable decisions, problems with the show’s writing staff and conflicts between showrunners and executives, according to several “Crystal Lake” team members who spoke to TheWrap. There are divergent accounts of how far the show was over budget. At the same time, studio insiders suggested to TheWrap that the show unraveled mostly because of Fuller and Gray.

A24 declined to comment to TheWrap for this story. But a source close to A24 said the studio has “made television with complicated people, who we love. That’s the background of the company – people with strong visions.” About “Crystal Lake,” the source said the studio “didn’t feel confident” and “had to pull the plug.”

But one “Crystal Lake” insider put it differently: “It felt like everybody on the Bryan/Jim side were trying very hard to make the show. A24 felt like they were doing everything they could to not make the show.”

How much Peacock knew about the showrunners’ removal is also a source of contention. Several sources said the streamer hadn’t known about their removal ahead of time, while others suggest they were intimately involved with the decision, and still another claimed the order came from one of the top executives at Universal. One source close to the production maintains that NBC Universal and A24 were aligned in their decision to remove Fuller and Gray.
Origins of “Crystal Lake”

The original “Friday the 13th,” released in 1980 by Paramount Pictures and directed by Sean S. Cunningham, a friend and colleague of Wes Craven’s, followed counselors getting ready to reopen a cursed summer camp, who are murdered one by one. At the end of the movie, it’s revealed that the killer was Pam Voorhees, the mother of Jason Voorhees, a young boy who drowned at Camp Crystal Lake years earlier.

The movie was a surprise smash, earning almost $60 million on a budget of $550,000, jumpstarting a bona-fide franchise for Paramount. The studio produced seven more sequels before selling the rights to New Line Cinema.

Those rights have been notoriously difficult to untangle, with original screenwriter Victor Miller and Cunningham battling it out in court for years and both Paramount and Warner Bros. claiming ownership at different times. Finally, in 2021, Miller won the domestic rights to “Friday the 13th,” while another entity (known as Horror Inc.) retained elements of the franchise, and Paramount held onto others.



A24 was instrumental in untangling the rights to the project, and helped secure a deal that would include the parts of the rights controlled by Miller, powerful IP attorney Marc Toberoff and another producer, according to a knowledgeable insider.

While the studio has clout for releasing critical darlings and scored a Best Picture Oscar (among others) for 2022’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” A24 — with a $2.5 billion valuation — has been expanding its strategy to include more commercial projects.

In the grand ambition of “Crystal Lake,” each season would be a “deconstruction” of the first four Paramount movies. The series would incorporate lore from several sequels but remix that material in a way similar to Fuller’s “Hannibal,” which interpolated the Thomas Harris novels for three seasons.

“We had the mask, we had the sequels, we could do whatever we wanted. He had a good path forward, which I did really like,” said a source close to the A24 side, of Fuller’s vision.

Toberoff initiated a “long, elaborate dance” with A24, which agreed to all of the terms he and Miller wanted. The studio was looking for a globally recognized property to move them into more mainstream territory and aimed to maintain the “A24-ness” of “Crystal Lake” by installing an auteur like Fuller behind the scenes.

A24 offered Fuller the show in December 2021, before the studio had even secured the rights. And on Halloween 2022, “Crystal Lake” got a straight-to-series order.

Written in blood

By January of 2023, a development room had been established, with Fuller, Gray and several writers working on deepening the world of “Crystal Lake.” What was initially a six-week stint was extended to May 2. That’s when the Writers Guild of America went on strike.

By Thanksgiving, both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes had been resolved, and by the beginning of 2024, “Crystal Lake” was back on track. Except there was one problem: Despite being the first studio to sign the WGA’s Minimum Basic Agreement, A24 refused to convert the writers who had worked on that initial development phase into actual, paid writers, according to several sources.

The writers had gone on strike in part over this practice of merely keeping a development room instead of converting that room into a paid writer’s room, and it was now verboten according to the WGA’s new deal with the studios. A24 assured Fuller and Gray that there would be a paid writer’s room but later backtracked, according to several “Crystal Lake” sources.

The lack of paid writers created an unfortunate logjam. Fuller couldn’t deliver polished scripts because the writers who wrote the initial versions needed to do another draft but were prohibited by guild guidelines, because they weren’t staffed writers. According to those with knowledge of the situation, the four writers are owed roughly $100,000 each for already completed work.

When approached by TheWrap, the guild said it had no comment on the matter. A source close to A24 denies any violations.

“Most of the time when we make shows, we have most of the season written” said a source close to A24. “You figure out how to get there. We just weren’t getting there.”

Those close to the project on the A24 side said “Crystal Lake” fell behind on producing scripts, which impacted the entire production.

Several other sources rebutted that claim and said not only was the production moving ahead as promised, it was actually ahead of schedule.

A24 also argued with Fuller and Gray over the scripts. “A24 would say ‘the writer’s room is Jim and Bryan’s living rooms.’ Their thinking was, ‘Well, we’ve gotten as far without them,’” said one member of the “Crystal Lake” team

One person on a call between Nandan and Gray described Gray as “adamant and obstinate” and “a puppet for Bryan; he knew we were right and he was powerless.” (Several others deny this depiction of Gray.)

An individual close to A24 said Fuller was too busy working on his upcoming movie “Dust Bunny” to pay attention to “Crystal Lake.” This has happened to him before, on “Star Trek: Discovery” and “American Gods” — two shows Fuller exited over budget concerns. “Crystal Lake” producers said that the production was unaffected by Fuller’s feature duties and that he wrote two “Crystal Lake” scripts while in post-production on the movie.

A source close to A24 maintains it was Fuller who didn’t want an actual writer’s room and that they would have hired the writers on if the show wasn’t so over-budget. “It was never like it was never happening,” said one source close to the production on the A24 side. “It was purely how does it look – are people coming for the whole production or part of the production? We still had a budget that was wildly over.”

“Crystal Lake” producers maintain they consistently requested additional weeks for the writers room and were told by A24 executives that Peacock had mandated they get no more than six weeks, when the WGA was mandating 12-week minimums.
Budget disputes

Each episode of “Crystal Lake,” which was intended to have eight per season, was budgeted at around $9.6 million, but according to sources, A24 wanted to cut that in half.

One source told TheWrap: “It was all set at that camp. It was all very feasible.”

In a meeting held prior to the shutdown and attended by several sources close to the production, Inman Young, A24’s production head whose previous credits include projects like “The Whale” (budget: $3 million) and “Waves” (budget: $6 million), claimed the show wasn’t just slightly over budget, it was 100% over budget. Several members of the “Crystal Lake” production team refuted that assertion.

A24 declined to make Young available for comment.

TheWrap viewed a budget compiled roughly a month before “Crystal Lake” was shut down that shows the series was roughly over budget by about $4-$6 million for the entire season. As the show progressed through prep and pre-production, several “Crystal Lake” insiders felt sure that the budget could be corralled to the satisfaction of both A24 and the “Crystal Lake” team. As one “Crystal Lake” team member said, depending on the strength of the American dollar, the budget could have been reduced by $2 million just by the conversion.

According to several “Crystal Lake” team members, the A24 executives were unaware of exactly how a television show operated. One often-repeated story involves Young. When the plan was introduced to shoot the show in multiple units — with a main unit, a second unit and a splinter unit — Young asked if A24 would have to hire two of every department head. (TV normally works with single department heads whose work filters into every unit, with one art director providing the art direction for the entire show, etc.)

“If you’re the production executive on ‘Red Rocket’ and you’re suddenly on this, you’re flabbergasted,” said one “Crystal Lake” member, referring to A24’s 2021 film with a budget of just $1.1 million. A source close to the project refuted this, suggesting that A24 had just come off of “The Sympathizer,” an HBO series that had “1.5 times the budget of ‘Crystal Lake.’”

Further confusion ensued when A24 put a deposit down on stages in Canada to aim for a summer shoot (on the budget TheWrap viewed, the proposed start date was July 22). It wasn’t clear to the “Crystal Lake” team if A24 knew that they had already rented the soundstages. “Some executives in A24 didn’t know that other executives at A24 had leased the offices,” said one “Crystal Lake” team member.

According to one “Crystal Lake” source, A24 was trying to make the show for dramatically less than the $85 million Peacock was giving them to make it. A source close to A24 vehemently denied that and maintained that the show was over-budget in a way that crippled the production.

A more likely scenario, according to another member of the “Crystal Lake” team, is that A24’s perceived inexperience led to confusion, disarray and questionable bookkeeping. “Their grasp on the process of how a show is done didn’t really seem to be comprehensive,” said one source close to the project. “From a budgeting point of view, we got a budget that didn’t really correspond to anything.”

What’s next?

According to one source close to the project, A24 is still committed to making the show, although it’s unclear if the studio will use the original Fuller scripts and outlines or start from scratch with new creative leadership. One suitor, according to several sources, is Nick Antosca, who worked with Fuller on “Hannibal” and wrote an unproduced “Friday the 13th” feature script back in 2015. Should Antosca get the job, he would jettison the work that had come before.

Agents have labeled the “Crystal Lake” project as “radioactive,” according to another source with knowledge, even though it is one of the most important shows to Peacock, several other sources said.

Some in the “Crystal Lake” orbit place the blame at the foot of NBCUniversal, who feared that the submitted scripts were “too dark.” But most of those TheWrap talked to believe A24 was, at best, ill-equipped to handle a project like “Crystal Lake.” “With A24, they panicked because they didn’t feel they could manage the situation,” said one “Crystal Lake” team member. “It’s the most honest explanation.”

To a degree, a source close to A24 agrees with this assessment. “We kept believing we could make it work. Some of that is our fault…But we believed in Bryan and his reassurances with us,” the source said. “We just didn’t have another option.”

Much like Jason rising from his watery grave in the closing moments of “Friday the 13th,” there are still others who feel like “Crystal Lake” isn’t quite dead yet.

“We believe in the show,” said a source close to A24. “We’re going to make it.”

Toberoff, for his part, told TheWrap that “the show is not in jeopardy,” and that “it’s unfortunate that it didn’t work out” thus far. A source close to NBCUniversal also maintains that the show is moving forward.

In addition to the writers who are allegedly owed money, countless crew members were also impacted by the show’s abrupt shutdown. “It was a big show coming to town, offering eight months of employment,” said one “Crystal Lake” team member. “And then two weeks into it – nothing.”