By the time it hit the big screen in the summer of 2003, Freddy vs. Jason had been stuck in development hell for well over a decade before it was finally dragged across the finish line by director Ronny Yu. A crossover between the two slasher icons was first mooted as early as 1987, but the declining box office returns that plagued both the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th franchises saw the studio wary of giving it the green light.
Naturally, it turned out to be the highest-grossing installment either of the long-running horror properties had ever seen after earning over $116 million at the box office on a $30 million budget, even if reviews were mixed across the board. While the titular showdown lived up to expectations, on the whole Freddy vs. Jason wasn’t great and even eighteen years later its audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is a bang average 50%, and movies designed to appeal to longtime fans generally tend to fare much better on the review aggregator in that regard.
As a true legend of horror and the creator of A Nightmare on Elm Street, there was hope in some quarters that Wes Craven could end up involved in Freddy vs. Jason during its early days, but he ended up distancing himself from the project instead. In fact, as early as 1995 the filmmaker said he had no interest in a crossover, and couldn’t think of a concept to make it work without tarnishing both main characters and delivering something like the old Universal crossovers where Abbott and Costello met Frankenstein and the Wolfman.
Freddy vs. Jason was largely predicated on fan service and still failed to deliver, so you can’t say that Craven didn’t make the right call in distancing himself from the monster mash.
from We Got This Covered https://ift.tt/3efhRjG
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