Saturday, January 30, 2021

Friday The 13th Franchise Now Caught Up In Another Legal Battle

Things used to be so simple. You’d get a bunch of young and pretty actors, mix up a couple of buckets of fake blood, make sure Kane Hodder is free for a few weeks and – boom – you’ve got yourself a Friday the 13th movie. Sadly Jason Voorhees’ cinematic rampage has been curtailed by a force more tenacious and single-minded than he could ever be: lawyers.

The Friday the 13th franchise has been stuck in legal limbo ever since original screenwriter Victor Miller launched a claim for the rights from Horror Inc’s Sean Cunningham. Back in 2018, the courts ruled in favor of Miller, though this was challenged on appeal and a final decision has not been made. Things have been delayed by COVID gumming up the gears of the California court system and the untimely death of the judge working on the case.

Now another lawsuit has hit the franchise, with Sean Cunningham taking New Line, Paramount and Warner Bros to court over unpaid profits. In his lawsuit (which you can read here), Cunningham accuses the studios of engaging in the notorious practice of ‘Hollywood accounting’, whereby those promised a percentage of the ‘net profit’ of a movie fail to see anything after creative sums mean a successful movie technically never made any money.

The most famous example is probably The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which New Line claimed were “horrendous losses” for the company. This resulted in successful legal action against the studio from the Tolkien trust, as by that time they’d made almost $3 billion and were noted as some of the highest-grossing movies of all time.

Cunningham says a similar thing happened with Friday the 13th (2009), which had a budget of $19m and made $129m. His suit alleges that the Defendants under-reported revenues for the movie in order to give the impression that the movie had not passed its “breakeven point”, meaning anyone with points on the net profit is getting a big fat zero.

The law is fairly well established on this, so my prediction is that the studios will settle out of court with Cunningham rather than see this go to trial. Even so, it’s likely to delay the return of the Friday the 13th even more, and it’s been 11 long years since we last saw Jason hack up a stoned teenager. Oh well, at least fans are stepping up to fill the gap.



from Movies – We Got This Covered https://ift.tt/3j1G4Lb
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