Given the rapid production of Friday the 13th films almost every year during The '80s, problems were bound to crop up eventually, especially as the series wore on and started to fall into Sequelitis.
- Friday the 13th Part 2 ran into a bunch of problems before a single frame was shot. Sean S. Cunningham, the director of the first film, disagreed with Paramount's plan to build the sequel around Pamela Voorhees' son Jason taking up his mother's murderous legacy, on the grounds that it would be a massive, unexplained retcon of the first film's backstory; instead, he wanted to make Friday an anthology series. Victor Miller, the first film's writer, supported Cunningham and followed him out the door, as did special effects artist Tom Savini. Ultimately, however, things went fairly smoothly once Steve Miner, a producer of the first film, stepped in to direct, and nothing was bad enough to derail or slow down production afterwards. The only problems came when the producers discovered that Marta Kober, the actress who played Sandra, was actually underage, forcing them to cut a full-frontal nude scene they'd shot with the actress, and when Jason's actor Steve Daskewicz accidentally cut his finger with a machete and needed thirteen stitches.
- Friday the 13th Part III was a 3-D Movie, which caused all manner of production difficulties. Getting the 3-D effects right (done in-camera in a time before post-conversion existed), especially with brand-new technology that they didn't have time to practice with, required dozens of takes and was prioritized over getting good performances out of the actors, leading to plenty of Dull Surprise moments. Shooting in 3-D also forced production to move from the East Coast (the first two films having been shot in New Jersey and Connecticut, respectively) to Southern California, which in turn meant that they couldn't bring back Daskewicz to play Jason, as he would have had to pay for his own ticket to Los Angeles; he was recast with Richard Brooker. The Louma crane used for certain shots also fell over one day, derailing a whole day's worth of filming, and there was Hostility on the Set between the cast and what James A. Janisse described
as a non-union "outlaw crew" who got drunk, used cocaine, and shot at rattlesnakes between takes, forcing assistant director Peter Schindler to corral them for the difficult technical aspects of the shoot. Production took twelve weeks, and most of the people who worked on the film have said that the shoot was difficult and unpleasant. - Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter made the problems of the previous two films look like nothing.
- Director Joseph Zito, fresh off The Prowler, was asked to both write and direct this film. The problem: Zito was not a screenwriter, and only took the writing job due to the promise of seeing his salary for the film doubled. As a result, he used that extra pay to hire Barney Cohen to ghostwrite the film for him, a move that got everybody involved (Zito, Cohen, and producer Phil Scuderi) in trouble with the Writers' Guild of America. Cohen would be credited as the sole screenwriter on the film (story credit went to Bruce Hidemi Sakow, who had written an early treatment that Zito was supposed to turn into a screenplay) as a result.
- Once production started, Zito treated his actors like crap. Many of them had No Stunt Double and had to perform dangerous stunts themselves, leading to injuries; Judie Aronson developed hypothermia from shooting a scene where she had to remain submerged in a very cold lake and was not allowed to get out between takes, and Peter Barton was slammed into a shower wall for real. Hostility on the Set developed between Zito and Ted White, who played Jason Voorhees, over Zito's treatment of the cast, such that White had his name taken off the credits. Corey Feldman also hated Zito and acted like a brat on set out of frustration with him, such that, during the scene where Tommy Jarvis kills Jason, Feldman pretended that the off-screen sandbags he was hacking at with a machete were actually Zito. Feldman's behavior was also the motivation for White in the scenes where Jason attacks Tommy; he was so annoyed working with Feldman that he wanted to scare the kid for real, and proceeded to deliberately go off-cue in order to get a more authentic reaction out of him.
- That's not to say that Zito was responsible for everything that went wrong. Lawrence Monoson's character Ted is smoking pot before he gets killed, so he decided to actually smoke pot in order to get into character for his death scene. This merely caused him to start freaking out on set, unable to concentrate due to drug-induced paranoia.
- The film was supposed to premiere in October 1984, but producer Frank Mancuso, Jr. (who had been involved in the franchise since Part 2 by then) was so impressed by it that he decided to push the release up to April. Unfortunately, this left only six weeks for post-production, leading to one of the only times when Paramount actively assisted in production on a Friday film, renting a house in Malibu for Zito, Mancuso, and their editors to rush through the job of getting the film ready for theatrical release. It ultimately paid off, as The Final Chapter made $33 million on a budget of just $2.6 million and was (until Freddy vs. Jason) a close second only to its immediate predecessor in box-office earnings, and while critics ravaged it as they always did, many Friday fans will point to it as one of the series' highlights.
- Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning had at least some troubles during filming, though exactly how many troubles, and who or what caused them, depends on who you ask.
- According to director Danny Steinmann and co-stars Shavar Ross, Dominick Brascia, and Debi-Sue Voorhees, there were a few minor problems with lead actor John Shepherd being standoffish during the shoot, a malfunctioning rain machine that held up filming of the climax, and make-up effects having to be cut or worked around during editing after Paramount deemed them sub-par, but production otherwise wasn't too problematic.
- On the other hand, Shepherd himself, lead actress Melanie Kinnaman, co-star Dick Wieand and stuntman Tom Morga have alleged that Steinmann spent most of the shoot bingeing on cocaine, and veered between being verbally abusive to most of the cast and so high off his ass that the cinematographer had to direct certain scenes, only cleaning up his act on days when Ross' mother was on-set. Steinmann also shot a couple of very graphic sex scenes, one of which was cut entirely, with the other being edited down to only about ten seconds. Wieand later theorized that Steinmann filmed the scenes so that the MPAA would insist on cutting them and let the gore go through uncensored, only for this plan to backfire when Paramount ended up cutting the gore and sex scenes out before even submitting the movie to the MPAA.
- Furthermore, A New Beginning was cast under a fake title, and none of the actors knew they were doing a Friday movie until they got the part. This especially irritated Shepherd, who had spent several months preparing for an audition for a movie he thought was about a man suffering from mental illness (he even volunteered at a mental hospital to prepare for the role), and feared being associated with a franchise known for sex and blood given that he was working as a church counselor at the time.
- When it was released, the film did reasonably well financially, but the critical reaction was abysmal even by the standards of the series, and it ultimately marked the first of a successively lower-grossing chain of sequels.
- For Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, writer-director Tom McLoughlin frequently found himself at odds with producer Don Behrns — a somewhat ironic situation given that Behrns had been the one who lobbied for him to fill both roles, after Paramount originally only hired him as writer with the intention of bringing back Steinmann as director. McLoughlin would sometimes come on set and find that things he had asked for were either missing or never delivered. Fittingly, Behrns admitted that he'd get a bonus if the film was completed on time. The cast and crew did get their revenge: a swamp cooler that Behrns had set aside as a gift to himself when filming wrapped ended up getting obliterated during the scene where Jason flips the RV. You can see it get launched when the RV flips and then it crashes along the ground.
- Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood was the most seriously troubled production in the series, and a sign of the Audience-Alienating Era to come.
- The production endured quite a bit of Development Hell, such that it would be the first Friday film since The Final Chapter to not come out one year after the last one. It was made under the shadow of diminishing box-office returns for the franchise since A New Beginning, causing Paramount to push for a crossover with the more commercially successful A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. However, New Line Cinema wouldn't play ball, and so producer Barbara Sachs and writer Daryl Haney instead came up with a story similar to Jaws about a land developer trying to build condos on Crystal Lake (with Jason serving as the "shark"). However, Mancuso (who had been promoted to executive producer for A New Beginning and had his last role in the franchise for this film, after having no involvement with Jason Lives) hated the idea and gave it an Executive Veto, leading Haney to instead pitch the idea of Jason fighting a Final Girl with telekinetic powers similar to Carrie. Everybody involved loved it and signed off on that instead.
- Just as he was in the process of finishing up the screenplay, a botched power play by Haney's agent saw him fired and replaced by an unidentified scab writer (the film was written during a Writers' Guild of America strike) who went under the credit of Manuel Fidello.note After this, the screenplay was heavily rewritten to bring it more in line with the earlier entries in the series, taking particular inspiration from The Final Chapter, as well as cutting some of the more ambitious (and expensive) ideas that Haney had tried to incorporate.
- That wouldn't be the end of it, however, as Sachs had enormous ambitions for the film, hoping to score a big-name director like Federico Fellini to helm it. The director they ultimately went with, John Carl Buechler, was a low-budget veteran of Full Moon Features, not the kind of filmmaker that Sachs was hoping for. Naturally, the two of them butted heads almost immediately, and Sachs frequently tried to override Buechler's decisions. Notably, Sachs didn't want to show Jason's face, forcing Buechler to wait until a day when she wasn't around to shoot those scenes. She also didn't like the makeup for Tina's dead father and instead opted to go with no makeup at all, meaning that, during the climatic scene where Tina revives her father to finish off Jason, the actor clearly does not look like a man who's spent a decade at the bottom of a lake.
- Sachs and Buechler's sour relationship was only the start of the problems. There was Hostility on the Set between Lar Park-Lincoln (who played the female lead Tina) and the rest of the cast, especially Kevin Spirtas (who played the male lead Nick), such that Park-Lincoln and Buechler (who she did get along well with) had an inside joke about it, and Spirtas claims to have written an unused script for an eighth film in which Nick kills off Tina. The set outside Mobile, Alabama had to be guarded by a man with a shotgun to ward off alligators. The film was shot in the winter, and the set was so cold that the actors (whose characters were dressed for summer) sucked on ice cubes between takes to prevent their breath from showing up on camera.
- Even post-production was troubled. The film had to be submitted to the MPAA and re-edited seven times in order to receive an R rating as opposed to an X, and as a result, most of the death scenes were cut to the point of being nearly incomprehensible.note Buechler describes the MPAA as having "raped" his movie.
- In the end, the film, which went from screenplay to premiere in six months, was a box-office disappointment, opening at #1 but quickly suffering a steep drop-off.
- Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan suffered most of its damage in pre-production, but filming itself, while not as troubled as The New Blood, didn't go entirely smoothly either.
- To start, it had to be heavily rewritten after Paramount halved the budget. Originally, it was planned to have the first act of the film take place on a cruise ship and the rest of the film to take place in New York, with scenes set at Madison Square Garden, the Brooklyn Bridge, a Broadway show, a Fifth Avenue department store, and the Statue of Liberty. By the time writer/director Rob Hedden was done rewriting the film to accommodate the reduced budget, the whole second act wound up set on the boat as well. They were ultimately only able to shoot in NYC for two days, one of which was spent filming footage for the trailer instead of the actual film.
- Problems also cropped up on set. The actor originally cast to play the male lead, Sean, had to be recast during production because, according to the producers, he came off as gay in the dailies and had no romantic chemistry with the female lead, Rennie. Director Rob Hedden also unsuccessfully pressured Rennie's actress Jensen Daggett to do a nude scene; when that failed, he successfully got Sharlene Martin, who played the Rich Bitch Tamara, to do it. Unfortunately, his means of doing so was to completely strip down himself and get into the shower in order to show Martin how easy it was; furthermore, the cameras were rolling when this happened, leaving the producers very confused when they went over the dailies the next day.
- The biggest problems, however, came with the boats they were filming on. Three days before filming started, production lost access to the cruise ship they were planning on using due to a scheduling mix-up, forcing them to use three different boats (each about half the size of the original one) in its place. One of them was owned by a businessman who neglected to tell the producers that he owed a massive debt to the wharf where the boat had previously been docked, and the owners of the wharf wound up severely limiting the hours at which they could shoot. Another boat was owned by a man in Washington state, which caused a problem as the production was shooting in British Columbia, Canada, and they couldn't legally bring the boat into Canada for filming purposes. Their solution was to load the boat with bags of potatoes and claim that its purpose was to import them to Canada.
- The original poster◊ for the film, a parody of New York's famous "I <Heart> NY" advertising slogan with Jason slashing through it, also had to be replaced after the New York City Tourism Committee filed a complaint with Paramount.
- The film wound up a Franchise Killer, leading to New Line Cinema buying the rights to Friday from Paramount. Fans regard the finished product as one of the worst films in the series, its only real rival being its immediate successor...
- Much like A New Beginning, it's generally agreed that Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday had a troubled shoot, but exactly how troubled and who was to blame remains disputed.
- Cunningham (who had returned from the first film as producer of this one) claims that first-time (at just 24 years old!) director Adam Marcus's inexperience caused him to badly mismanage the shoot, including letting through obviously flubbed scenes without retakes, shooting lengthy sequences entirely in slow-motion, and forgetting to film important lines of dialogue, requiring Cunningham to reshoot nearly half of the movie.
- Others involved with the production, however, have claimed Cunningham's accounts to be grossly exaggerated, and instead place the blame on Cunningham himself for being a Pointy-Haired Boss during production.
- The one thing that all the accounts seem to agree on is that Marcus did not get on well in the slightest with lead actress Kari Keegan, who reportedly threatened to quit several times during filming.
- The end product did a little better than Jason Takes Manhattan at the box-office, though not by a whole lot (albeit it had a smaller budget, making it an overall more profitable venture), and many fans would prefer to think that it never happened.
- During production of Jason X, writer Todd Farmer and director Jim Isaac did not get along at all. The film saw constant, heavy rewrites during production that required Farmer to be on set at all times; by his account, the entire crew hated him. Of particular note was tension over the film's tone, with Farmer's version being more serious and Isaac's being a lot goofier. On the commentary track for the film, they barely try to hide their enmity for one another, the two frequently taking potshots at each other.
- Freddy vs. Jason was trapped in Development Hell for over a decade, and even after production finally got underway, it wasn't smooth sailing.
- Plans for a crossover between Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street had been in the works since 1987, with an early draft of The New Blood being penned as Nightmare 13 - Freddy vs Jason. However, neither Paramount Pictures nor New Line Cinema could come to a licensing agreement, and the project eventually stagnated.
- After the critical and financial failure of Jason Takes Manhattan, original Friday director Sean S. Cunningham purchased the rights to the franchise and took them to New Line Cinema to begin work on a crossover film. Several different scripts were solicited, but production was put on hold yet again when Wes Craven returned to New Line to direct New Nightmare. Cunningham subsequently produced Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday as a means to set up a crossover, but production was delayed yet again after the project's biggest advocate, New Line's President of Production Michael De Luca, stepped down. Cunningham than produced Jason X in the hopes of keeping the franchise fresh in audiences' minds, but a lack of support for the finished film led to it sitting on the shelf with incomplete visual effects before being released in 2002 with the lowest grossing box office of the series thus far.
- Production finally resumed in late 2002, with the numerous earlier scripts being disposed of and a new script by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift being commissioned by New Line executives who hoped for a "fresh start" for the long-stagnant project. Director Ronny Yu was hired after the critical and financial success of Bride of Chucky despite his unfamiliarity with the franchises in question.
- Casting proved an additional headache. Cunningham wanted to keep Kane Hodder, who had played Jason since The New Blood, in the role, but the studio pushed for the part to be recast with Ken Kirzinger, in keeping with their vision of a "fresh start" and because they wanted a bigger Jason who would tower over Freddy Krueger. Katharine Isabelle and Brad Renfro were originally cast as the leads Lori and Will, but both parts were recast, the former prior to principal photography and the latter a week into filming because Renfro showed up to the set strung out on drugs and unable to perform.note Isabelle was eventually given the supporting part of Gibb more in line with her desired performance, and Jason Ritter was cast in Renfro's stead.
- During filming, Isabelle clashed with Yu multiple times due to his attempting to pressure her into performing a nude scene despite a prior "no nudity" clause in her contract, an incident Isabelle considered "distasteful" and considerably soured her opinion of the project. They eventually settled on using a body double for her nude scenes.
- The film premiered on August 13, 2003 and became the biggest box-office hit in both the Friday and Nightmare franchises. However, Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash, a planned sequel that would've crossed the two series over with Evil Dead, fell apart due to Creative Differences between New Line and Bruce Campbell, and would eventually be released as a comic book rather than a film.
- Plans for a crossover between Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street had been in the works since 1987, with an early draft of The New Blood being penned as Nightmare 13 - Freddy vs Jason.
- The franchise as a whole has been stuck in Development Hell for almost a decade now. The planned sequel to the remake never really got off the ground due to the down economy, and a dispute between New Line and Paramount. Then New Line lent its share of the rights (they own the Jason Voorhees character) to Paramount (they own the Friday the 13th title), and after numerous release date changes, finally greenlit Friday the 13th: Part 13 for an October 13, 2017 release date with filming slated to begin in March 2017 and Breck Eisner directing. Then Rings flopped at the box office in February, and Paramount canceled the film just weeks before filming was to begin. Then New Line got back its share of the rights. And then Victor Miller, the writer of the original film, sued Cunningham (who remained producer for all of the franchise's material released after Jason Goes to Hell) over the rights to the Jason Voorhees character, which has not only put any future films in jeopardy, it stopped Friday the 13th: The Game from creating any new content.
