Although it hasn’t been officially confirmed, it looks like writers Damian Shannon and Mark Swift of Shark Tale (2004) and FVJ (2003) are writing the new version of the script.  The movie is still set to go into production in early 2008.

Will Shannon and Swift have the last word on the script?And will Jason be shown as a child, a zombie, a child-zombie, or maybe as a pal of Michael Myers as in several recent YouTube videos?

In general, this remake (which was announced last year) is the kind of story that the Web loves—tips become rumors and beget more rumors (and of course I’m as guilty as anyone in spreading them).  Preproduction and pre-preproduction decisions are scrutinized and analyzed and the information does not really matter much because the people making the movie will continue to make it without input from all the fans who are reading and writing about it.  And those who are apt to go see the finished product, will see it regardless.Short of using a name-brand cast and crew, how much will the audience for a relaunched Friday the 13th shift as the result of such announcements and pseudo-announcements?

More interesting to me than probably the film itself will end up being are all of the meta-discussions about remakes that the recent wave of re-launches (both in and outside of horror) have prompted.  There seem to be two schools of thought.  One suggests that re-making so-so movies or quasi-"classics" such as Friday the 13th is the way to go.  They can only benefit, says the reasoning, from hindsight, bigger budgets, and, one would hope, fresh thinking.  The other camp wonders why anyone would bother remaking a property that was mediocre to begin with.

I guess I’m not part of either camp, possibly because my feeling about whether any given movie should be made or re-made seems beside the point.

  Can’t I just wait until the movie is released and then decide whether or not to see it?  For me, the idea that remakes are somehow controversial is the kind of tempest-in-a-teapot issue that, for better or worse, separates fandom from the rest of popular culture.  Only hardcore fans feel that remakes somehow play with the pristine quality of whatever iconic memory they’ve been carrying around in their heads for twenty or thirty years; the rest of the moviegoing public just says, “Oh, so they remade that?  Is it any good?”

People who moan about remakes in horror in principle, although aesthetically entitled to their opinions about any specific film, are generally on shaky ground in terms of cultural history.  As a case in point, the entire Friday the 13th franchise itself didn’t really care too much about “respecting” the “source material” of the original 1980 film.  That is, why would Michael Bay do a worse job than, say, a producer no one can remember who crafted one of the umpteen forgettable sequels of the 1980s and 1990s?

Taking an even broader view, horror stories have always been remade if sufficiently iconic—not meaning “profound” or “classic” but simply “worshipped “ (i.e. at the box office).  After all, how many times has the story of Frankenstein’s monster been retold in the three-quarters of a century following the James Whale version?  Actually, I’m the one who’s being myopic now:  Frankenstein had already appeared in multiple silent film versions by the time of Karloff, starting back with a 1910 Edison film.  One wonders how the creative/personnel decisions of Laemmle, Whale, et al., would have been debated if the Web had been around when they decided to “relaunch” a story that had already existed for more than a century.

(Source:  Rotten Tomatoes)