Back in 2013, Warner Bros. handed the rights to make a new FRIDAY THE 13TH film over to Paramount Pictures for a period of five years. Paramount proceeded to spend that time developing scripts that weren't in continuity with any of the previous films. At least three different scripts were turned in, all of them set in the '80s, one of them a found footage story. One script, a scrambled-up remake that would have had Jason Voorhees, his mother, and his father all killing people in their own section of the film, got within weeks of going into production before Paramount mercifully cancelled the project and saved us from that mess.
But before Paramount failed to get a FRIDAY THE 13TH movie made on their own, they failed to get one made while collaborating Warner Bros. Paramount had been the original distributor of the franchise, but WB / New Line Cinema took over as of JASON GOES TO HELL. When production company Platinum Dunes came on board to reboot the franchise with 2009's FRIDAY THE 13TH, they wanted to use elements from the Paramount era films, so Paramount and Warner Bros. made a deal to make and release the '09 film together.
Since FRIDAY THE 13TH '09 made over $91 million at the global box office on a budget of $19 million, it made total sense when it was announced that Paramount, WB, and Platinum Dunes would be working together again on a sequel to that film. Screenwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, who previously wrote both F13 '09 and FREDDY VS. JASON, turned in a script… but the sequel never got off the ground because the deal between the studios didn't go as smoothly this time around.
Very little has been revealed about Shannon and Swift's script for the sequel to the '09 film, other than the fact that it would have – of course – featured more young people getting killed in the vicinity of Camp Crystal Lake. But now we know what the title would have been.
To celebrate the fact that this week ends in a Friday the 13th, Shannon and Swift took to their Twitter account to share a shot of the title page of their unmade sequel script. Their suggestion for the title was FRIDAY THE 13TH: CAMP BLOOD, a perfectly fine title for an F13 movie.
But there's another line of text on the title page. Another subtitle: "The Death of Jason Voorhees". After F13 '09 built up a rebooted version of Jason, even showing how he acquired his hockey mask, it sounds like Shannon and Swift were planning to kill him off as well.
The filmmakers of THE FINAL CHAPTER and THE FINAL FRIDAY would be able to tell you that it's impossible to really kill off Jason, rights issues and studio paperwork are truly the only things that can keep him from returning to the screen, but it's interesting to hear that Shannon and Swift wanted to bring us his "Death".
If all had gone as planned, we would have gotten to see this death of Jason Voorhees when FRIDAY THE 13TH: CAMP BLOOD hit theatre screens (in 3D) on August 13, 2010.
It wasn't to be.