For a few months this year, Hollywood had the faintly surreal prospect of two rival Freddy Kruegers, one for America and one for everywhere else, each presumably stalking the other’s teenagers through a different distribution territory. According to Dread Central, that dream is over. The site reported on 10 November, citing unnamed sources, that Warner Bros.’ version, which Lee Cronin was in talks to make, is dead. That leaves Paramount’s reboot as the only Elm Street in development. Neither studio has commented, so for now this is a well-sourced report rather than an announcement.
The tangle starts with the rights. In July, Variety and Dread Central reported that Paramount had licensed the US rights to Wes Craven’s original 1984 screenplay from the Craven estate. Craven’s widow, Iya Labunka, and his son, Jonathan Craven, are producing with the attorney Marc Toberoff, and Paramount’s genre label, Paramount Primal, is overseeing it. New Line, the company that built itself on Freddy and is long since part of Warner Bros., kept the international rights. A few weeks later, Puck’s Kim Masters reported that Warner executives Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy were talking to Cronin, the director of Evil Dead Rise, about a version of their own that could only be released outside the US. It was a franchise split down the middle like a Freddy jumper, with Paramount holding the red stripes and Warner the green.
Then Skydance bought Warner Bros. Discovery, and one company found itself owning both halves of the same nightmare. Dread Central says De Luca and Abdy have since been pushed out, citing TheWrap, and the Cronin project went with them. Nobody has been named to write or direct the surviving Paramount film, and there is no word on who will wear the hat and the knife-glove. It’s the same week that Skydance showed James Gunn and Peter Safran the door at DC Studios. The new management is clearly working through the cupboards, deciding which of the two of everything it wants to keep.
As for the casting, good luck to whoever gets it. Robert Englund played Freddy across eight films and made him the wisecracking star of his own slasher franchise. Jackie Earle Haley gamely took on the 2010 remake and found that audiences preferred the original, scars and all. Going back to Craven’s own 1984 script is the most sensible idea anyone has had for Elm Street in years. That version of Freddy was a genuinely frightening child-killer who existed in dreams, not a stand-up comic with a sideline in murder. Craven was drawing on a very old fear: the thing that sits on your chest while you sleep, which Henry Fuseli painted in 1781. Fuseli never got a sequel, which probably explains why his work has held up so well.
Join the conversation (0)