Friday the 13th Returns: Steve Miner Directs the 13th Film for 2027

Jason Voorhees is coming back to cinemas. Steve Miner will direct a 13th Friday the 13th film for 2027, working from a script by David Fliegel, and it will be the first theatrical entry in the slasher franchise since the 2009 reboot.

Deadline broke the news with the structure attached: the Barsamian family is financing and producing through Horror, Inc., the company that controls the rights, with CatchLight Studios as production partner and Cineverse holding North American distribution, theatrical included. No studio is bankrolling this one, which is how the 1980 original was made.

Miner is the reason the character looks the way he does. He directed Friday the 13th Part 2, which first handed Jason the machete, and Part III, which put the hockey mask on him. He also made Halloween H20 in 1998, so he has done the twenty-years-later job once before.

“I’m thrilled to come back and continue the legacy.”

— Steve Miner

Horror, Inc. executive vice president Robbie Barsamian said the independent setup gives the family creative control, and that Jason’s identity is tied to choices Miner made on screen. CatchLight co-founder Jeanette Volturno described the plan as a practically shot film, which rules out the heavy digital gore the genre has drifted toward. Cineverse chairman Chris McGurk, whose company turned the Terrifier sequels into a theatrical business, framed it as putting Jason back in cinemas. Between them that is a distribution deal, a production partner and a director already signed, which is further along than most announced horror revivals get before the trade write-up.

The first Friday the 13th did not even have Jason in it. A group of counselors reopening Camp Crystal Lake were killed off by an unseen attacker who turned out to be Pamela Voorhees, grieving the boy who drowned there years earlier, and the sequels handed the machete to her son. Sean S. Cunningham directed that one. Warner Bros. handled the 2009 reboot, which is the version most people under 30 saw first.

The timing is not sentimental. Crystal Lake, the Peacock prequel series made with A24, dropped all eight episodes on 15 October and pulled 1.3 billion minutes viewed in its first 11 days, per Nielsen. That made it Peacock’s fourth-best scripted-original debut, and IGN scored it 8/10, crediting Linda Cardellini’s Pamela Voorhees and showrunner Brad Caleb Kane’s handle on the source material. Callum Vinson plays a young Jason in it. Those are the numbers a theatrical pitch gets built on, and I did not expect a Pamela Voorhees prequel to be the thing that finally moved this franchise back into cinemas.

The franchise has always run on cheap money. The 1980 original was made independently for about $550,000 and picked up by Paramount in a bidding war, and the twelve films since have grossed close to $450 million worldwide. Horror, Inc. set up the Jason Universe in 2024 to push the brand into games, comics, collectibles and live experiences, and marked the 45th anniversary with a Mike P. Nelson short called Sweet Revenge.

I have a low opinion of revivals that mainly sell the mask back to people who already own it, and the hockey mask is the single most merchandised object in horror. The pitch here is practical kills and a director who knows where the camera goes. Whether that is a film or a 90-minute piece of brand maintenance comes down to Fliegel’s script, and nobody outside Horror, Inc. has read it.

Horror is having a commercial year across formats. Illfonic put out Halloween: The Game in September, Saber released Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival in October, Mike Flanagan’s Carrie adaptation for Prime Video has a second season, and a new Nightmare on Elm Street is moving at Paramount, which would put Freddy Krueger back in production at roughly the same time as Jason. Friday the 13th has fed the games side for years, and I would rather the Jason Universe produce one game worth finishing than another round of licensed merchandise.

There is no cast, no date beyond 2027, and no word on whether the film acknowledges Crystal Lake or ignores it, which matters because the series just spent eight episodes filling in Pamela’s side of the story. The 2009 reboot took the opposite route and compressed the early films into one timeline. Continuity has never been the franchise’s strong suit anyway: Part 2 and Part III run across about two days of story, and a later entry put Jason in space.

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