Over the past few years, we’ve seen the return of slasher icons like Chucky and Candyman and Michael Myers in long-awaited movie reboots. The Halloween sequel trilogy was a box office success, despite being a critical flop, so Hollywood is understandably looking to all the old slasher franchises to see which ones they can bring back. They’ve brought back Scream, Texas Chainsaw, and I Know What You Did Last Summer.
While a Freddy Krueger revival is still nowhere in sight, Jason Voorhees is about to return to our screens — but not in the way you think. It would’ve been easy for Hollywood to churn out another Friday the 13th movie where the hockey-mask-clad killer wipes out another group of teenagers who thought it would be a good idea to go to Camp Crystal Lake.
But that’s not the case with A24’s upcoming Friday the 13th reboot. Rather than get someone like Ti West to make a tasteful, artsy Friday the 13th movie, they’ve gone and made a prequel series for Peacock. Crystal Lake will go back and explore Jason’s origin story, and it’s set to finally make its debut on October 15, 2026.
Crystal Lake has been a long time coming. The possibility of a Friday the 13th TV series first came up way back in 2003. A pilot was produced for The CW in 2014, but the network decided to move forward with different projects instead. The version of the show we’re about to see on Peacock has been in the works since 2022, when Hannibal’s Bryan Fuller was set as the showrunner. In 2024, Fuller was replaced by Brad Caleb Kane — best known as the singing voice of Disney’s Aladdin — and it started to seem like this show was doomed to burn in development hell for all eternity.
But now, Crystal Lake is finally about to premiere on Peacock, just in time for the spooky season, and if it’s any good, it’ll be a long-anticipated comeback for the Friday the 13th franchise. Friday the 13th hasn’t had a major release since the 2009 movie — which retold the plot of the original film, but with classic Jason as the killer instead of O.G. Pamela — so it’s about time the franchise was resuscitated for another day in the sun.
Crystal Lake will star the incomparable Linda Cardellini as Jason’s mother and up-and-coming child star Callum Vinson as Jason himself, and their casting alone is enough to make this one of my most highly anticipated shows of the year. Cardellini is a screen legend, with decades’ worth of iconic roles under her belt, and it’ll be interesting to see what she does with the role of a sinister but sweet-seeming serial killer. Vinson gave an unforgettable guest turn in the last season of Poker Face, so I can’t wait to see what he does with the role of young Jason Voorhees.
If Crystal Lake is a hit, then the renewed interest in the franchise could help push for another Friday the 13th movie. It seems as though there are some rights issues on the movie side, but not on the TV side. A streaming show like Crystal Lake is in the clear — that’s why it’s a streaming show — but once you start making a Friday the 13th movie, New Line Cinema gets involved and the legality becomes very messy and complicated.
So, it might not even be possible to make a new Friday the 13th movie. But surely, if Crystal Lake makes Friday the 13th all the rage again, New Line will want to work out a deal to get a movie into theaters as soon as possible.
