Friday the 13th Marathon Airing on SYFY to Celebrate 13 Days Until October

While some people wait until the arrival of October to officially start celebrating the Halloween season, others can’t wait to start celebrating all things spooky, with SYFY helping make the wait until October a little bit easier by broadcasting a marathon of Friday the 13th films all day long. Over the course of the marathon, audiences will be able to tune in to watch Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning, Friday the 13th Part II, and the original 1980 Friday the 13th that kicked off the whole series. You can check out the full schedule of programming at SYFY’s website.

The last film in the franchise hit theaters in 2009 and served as a reboot and reimagining of components from the first three films in the series, with various attempts to continue the series failing to gestate in recent years. Back in 2018, Blumhouse Productions crafted a new entry into the Halloween franchise, which had similarly failed to earn exciting new additions for nearly a decade, leading some fans to think Blumhouse should be the one to bring the series back from the dead.

“I have the same question!” producer Jason Blum previously responded to a fan via Fandom about if he would ever produce a new film in the series. “I don’t have an answer to that. But like I’ve said before, I would love to do it and it’s very complicated, but I hope someday. How about that? It’s not the answer I want to hear because I wish it was right away, but it isn’t.”

While it’s promising that such a successful producer would be interested in reviving the dormant franchise, there are some legal troubles preventing such an opportunity from happening.

Following the success of Halloween in 1978, director Sean S. Cunningham secured the title “Friday the 13th” and hired Victor Miller to write the script for the film. The original film sees a group of camp counselors attempting to renovate a decrepit facility, only to subsequently be killed off by an unseen force. In the second film, Jason Voorhees emerged as the murderer, who would secure his iconic hockey mask in the third film. Miller, however, was only responsible for crafting the original storyline and was largely absent from the rest of the series.

Cunningham and Miller are currently embroiled in a legal battle over who owns the rights to various components of the franchise, with Miller scoring a victory last year but Cunningham contesting that outcome. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the legal dispute has stagnated for months.

Stay tuned for details on the future of the Friday the 13th franchise.

Will you be tuning in to the marathon? Let us know in the comments below or contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter to talk all things horror and Star Wars!