Freddy vs. Jason opened on August 15, 2003 and took $36.4 million in three days, held the top of the box office for a second weekend, and finished with $82.6 million domestic against a $30 million budget, per Box Office Mojo. Worldwide it landed at roughly $116.6 million. For a studio that had spent something close to $6 million and more than a decade of development on drafts nobody shot, according to Bloody Disgusting’s twentieth anniversary look back, that was not just a win. It was vindication.
THE SEQUEL PROBLEM
Then came the part nobody plans for, which is the morning after a hit.
Freddy and Jason had already fought. You cannot sell the same argument twice. The ending of the movie had been deliberately fuzzy, Jason walking out of the lake carrying Freddy’s head, Freddy’s eye opening for a wink, and that fuzziness was the point. Neither franchise had been damaged. Neither had been settled. Whatever came next had to escalate without breaking anything.
New Line’s answer was a hero. Not a final girl. A hero, singular, with a chainsaw where his right hand used to be, a sawed off shotgun, and a decade of catchphrases already loaded. Ashley J. Williams had not appeared on screen since Army of Darkness in 1992, which meant he came with hunger attached. Jason Goes to Hell had already put the Necronomicon in the Voorhees basement in 1993, which meant the three mythologies could be stitched together without anyone inventing a magic door.
On paper, it was the easiest pitch in horror.
CAUSE OF DEATH
Three franchises, one movie, and no version of the ending that all three sides could sign.
Freddy and Jason both lived at New Line by 2003, but Ash did not. He belonged to Sam Raimi, Robert Tapert and Bruce Campbell, who had spent twenty years keeping that character close, and who by 2004 had their own horror company in Ghost House Pictures and their own slate to protect. New Line could write the movie. It could not cast the movie without a licensing deal, and it could not offer the other side the one thing the other side wanted, which was the right to have Ash win in a way that stuck.
There is no single killing blow here. There is a stack of them. A studio that would not let its own asset be permanently destroyed by someone else’s asset. A rights holder who saw no upside in renting out his one hero to a project he could not steer. The breakout success of The Grudge and Ghost House’s growing slate made the whole conversation less urgent for Raimi’s side. A studio appetite that was already turning toward remakes rather than sequels. And underneath all of it, the thing nobody says out loud in a pitch meeting: a character who can be killed is worth less than a character who cannot.
TIME OF DEATH
August 15, 2003. Freddy vs. Jason opens. Sequel conversations start almost immediately.
October 30, 2003. Creative executive Jeff Katz and senior vice president Stokely Chaffin send an internal memo to New Line president and COO Toby Emmerich. Its title, per the copy Bloody Disgusting published in 2017, is ROUND TWO: FREDDY VS. JASON, subtitled Why Ash Works. Ten weeks after the biggest opening in either franchise’s history, the studio is not asking whether to make another one. It is arguing about who the third body should be.
Late 2003 into 2004. Katz writes a full treatment. He has said he pitched the idea around the building as an intern and kept pitching it as an executive, and that once the movie performed the studio backed him and had him write it up.
THE WINDOW STARTS TO CLOSE
October 2004. The story is out. Katz confirms the treatment publicly in an interview with Creature Corner, reposted by MovieWeb on October 6, 2004, while calling the project by its working title. His words: “There’s nothing official on the Freddy Vs. Jason 2 front yet.”
October 22, 2004. Bloody Disgusting, by its own later account, is sitting on a story that New Line is in final talks for the rights to Ash. That same weekend, Ghost House’s remake of The Grudge opens to $39.1 million. Within days Raimi is publicly attached to remaking The Evil Dead. Bloody Disgusting later reported that its sources considered this the moment the New Line deal died.
March 20, 2007. Robert Englund, talking to MTV, refers to the crossover in the past tense. Rotten Tomatoes picks it up three days later and calls the project ashcanned. Englund spends the rest of the interview lobbying for a prequel and mentioning studio talks about Michael Myers that he has only heard about secondhand.
August 21, 2007. Writer James Kuhoric tells CBR that the film “made it to the draft approval stage with an extensive outline” before the licensing side killed it, and that the comic is being built directly from Katz’s material with permission.
November 2007 to March 2008. The comic runs.
The movie, in other words, was alive for roughly a year and has been dead for more than twenty years. The corpse is unusually well preserved, because two of the primary documents leaked.
EVIDENCE
Start with the memo, because it is the only piece of paper in this story written before anyone knew how it ended.
THE MEMO
The October 2003 memo is an internal sales pitch. Katz and Chaffin are not describing a movie so much as pre-answering the objections they expect from the executive who has to approve one. They walk through the other icons that had been kicked around inside the building, and the list is longer than franchise legend usually admits: Michael Myers, Pinhead, the Leprechaun, Chucky, and the Tall Man from Phantasm. All of them are dismissed on the same two grounds, that they “flat out [don’t] fit in the Freddy and Jason worlds,” and that each one would require a deal with another studio.
Read that twice. The memo argues for Ash partly because everyone else would be a rights negotiation. Ash was also a rights negotiation. That is the joke the document does not know it is telling.
The memo contains three other things worth flagging. It reports that Englund had been growing tired of the makeup as early as 2003. It says that in prior conversations Englund agreed fans would accept Ash being the one to end Freddy, with the alternative framed as another teenage girl doing the job again. And it argues the project would take a budget cut rather than an increase, while pointing at Halloween H20 and Halloween Resurrection as the model to avoid. Katz later donated the physical copy to Dark Delicacies in Burbank.
THE TREATMENT
Then there is the treatment itself, which runs seventeen pages of bullet points rather than a script.
It is set a few weeks before Christmas. Crystal Lake has iced over, the town has been redeveloped after the destruction in the last film, and at midnight on New Year’s Eve it is due to be renamed Forest Green, which is a Jason Lives reference doing structural work. There is a new S-Mart in town. Ash has transferred in to work house wares, which is cover for the real job of finding the Necronomicon buried in the Voorhees basement. Freddy is not dead. He is imprisoned inside Jason’s head, clinging to the last piece of fear he planted there, and the false Pamela Voorhees he conjures promises Jason two things in exchange for the book: his mother back, and intelligence.
The set pieces are exactly what you would expect and a few that you would not. Jason walks into a crowded S-Mart at Christmas. Ash fights him through the aisles with garden tools and small appliances after losing the boomstick. Freddy eventually turns the Voorhees house into the Elm Street house, mailbox included, and sics the Elm Street jump rope girls on Ash, who has to fight two little girls with a chainsaw, which is either the best or worst idea in the document depending on your tolerance. Freddy’s real plan is to use the book to make waking reality behave like a dream, and when Ash vows to stop him, Krueger’s answer is the treatment’s single best line: “I did it ten minutes ago.”
Two things in that document matter more than any of the carnage.
THE DEAL POINT IN THE MARGIN
The first is a note in the margin of the climax, offering that if Sam Raimi requests it, Ash can be pulled into the vortex as well and dropped somewhere else in time. That is not a story idea. That is a deal point written into a story, a producer leaving a door open for a partner who has not signed. It tells you exactly how tentative the Evil Dead side of this was while the New Line side was writing.
THE ENDING THAT WASN’T
The second is the ending. For twenty years the shorthand version of this story has been that Ash was going to kill Freddy and Jason and New Line said no. The memo does support half of that. The treatment does not. In the treatment, Ash blasts Freddy into a closing vortex and the book goes with him, and the coda pulls down through the ice to find Jason pinned under a sunken Oldsmobile with his eye snapping open, because lakes thaw. Freddy is destroyed in the way horror movies destroy people they intend to see again. Jason is filed away for the sequel.
So the surviving film document already contains the compromise. Even in the version written by the movie’s biggest advocate, inside the studio that owned two thirds of it, nobody actually gets to end Jason Voorhees.
Worth noting for anyone reading the treatment cold: it is a 2003 studio document and it reads like one. Jason is repeatedly described using a slur for intellectual disability, and one of the S-Mart kids is introduced by race and attitude in a way that would not survive a first pass today. It is evidence, not an artifact to be admired.
WHO WAS ACTUALLY ON BOARD?
As for who was on board, the accounts split. Katz has consistently said he had support. He told Friday The 13th: The Website that he went to Campbell early for his blessing, brought in Tapert early, and found Sean Cunningham especially supportive, and that the intent was for Ash to kill both villains and then walk into a larger Evil Dead film with Raimi more involved. He told Dread Central in 2015 that Bob Shaye and Toby Emmerich embraced it, that “New Line really wanted it to happen,” and that the deal with Raimi, Tapert and Campbell simply did not come together.
Campbell’s version of the same period is four minutes shorter and considerably less warm.
THE FIGHT OVER WHO WINS
Campbell has told this story for a decade and the details have stayed consistent, which is more than can be said for most franchise anecdotes.
CAMPBELL’S VERSION
His account, given to Collider at San Diego Comic-Con in July 2024, is that New Line approached them, that the conversation lasted about five minutes, and that “these ideas are creatively bankrupt” for a specific and unromantic reason. Then the money. Three parties splitting one pot, with partners nobody chose.
ENGLUND’S VERSION
Englund’s memory points the same direction and assigns the blame differently. Englund stated that bringing Campbell in for part two had been his idea, that he had the poster worked out with Ash holding both monsters in headlocks, and that his tagline was “Keeping the world safe from sequels.” The studio’s objection, as he recalls it, was that they did not want Freddy killed. He pointed out, reasonably, that Freddy has been killed repeatedly and once came back because a dog urinated on his remains. Elsewhere Englund has said the movie came close and that “I think Sam wanted Ash to win,” adding that he liked the idea.
WHY THE STORIES DON’T MATCH
Here is where the popular version of this story flattens something more interesting. It was not that one man demanded a victory and one studio refused it. It is that the internal document and the external offer were two different pieces of paper. Inside New Line, Katz and Chaffin were arguing that Ash killing Freddy was a feature, with Englund’s tacit blessing attached. Outside New Line, what Campbell says he was offered was a movie in which he controlled one character, changed nothing, and killed nobody. Both of those can be true at once. Development memos are advocacy. Deal terms are what the lawyers will actually sign, and business affairs does not care what the fans will embrace.
There was already a rehearsal for this problem. The Damian Shannon and Mark Swift script for Freddy vs. Jason once ended with the two of them dragged into hell and separated by Pinhead, who asks what the problem seems to be. New Line liked it. New Line did not want to license a Dimension character for a few seconds of screen time, as Shannon told Bloody Disgusting in comments collected by Collider. A cameo was too expensive in rights terms. A co-lead was never going to be cheap.
Strip away the affection and a crossover is a joint venture in which every partner is contributing an appreciating asset and every partner wants it returned undamaged. Freddy cannot be made incompetent, because New Line’s identity was built on him. Jason cannot be humiliated, because Jason is the immovable object and that is the entire product. Ash cannot lose, because Ash losing makes the Evil Dead brand a supporting player in somebody else’s franchise. Three people walk into the room, all of them are right, and the movie is impossible.
SURVIVORS
The treatment did not die. It changed medium.
THE MOVIE BECOMES A COMIC
Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash ran six issues from November 2007 to March 2008, published by Wildstorm under DC Comics and co-published with Dynamite Entertainment, written by James Kuhoric, drawn by Jason Craig, colored by Thomas Mason and lettered by Jared K. Fletcher, with covers by J. Scott Campbell and Eric Powell and story credit to Katz. Kuhoric told CBR he was working from the outline with permission from the studios and from Katz, that the treatment made filling in details easy, and that unlike the film, this one would end with a clear winner.
Katz has said the plan was originally for him to adapt his own treatment, but he left New Line for 20th Century Fox and was already writing Booster Gold for DC, so Kuhoric took the reins, and that a New Line executive named David Imhoff put the deal together. Katz’s own summary of the whole affair is the most honest line anyone has given about it: “Bad timing is what killed the movie deal.”
If you read the comic against the treatment, most of the skeleton survives. The S-Mart, the renaming of Crystal Lake, Freddy trapped in Jason’s mind, the false Pamela, the Necronomicon in the basement, the returning survivors of the last film getting killed in the opening. The comic ends with Freddy banished into the Deadite world and Jason sealed under the frozen lake with the book, which is the treatment’s ending with the ambiguity sanded off.
NIGHTMARE WARRIORS GOES BIGGER
The sequel is where it stops being a movie adaptation and becomes something a studio would never have paid for. Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash: The Nightmare Warriors ran six issues from August 2009, written by Katz and Kuhoric with Craig returning on art and Arthur Suydam on covers. A government program digs up the Necronomicon, pulls Freddy back, and loses control of both killers. Ash ends up fighting alongside a support group of survivors from both franchises: Tommy Jarvis, Nancy Thompson, Alice Johnson, Maggie Burroughs, Tina Shepard, Rennie Wickham, Neil Gordon, Stephanie Kimble, Jacob Johnson, Steven Freeman. Washington gets leveled. Jason commands an army.
No version of the film would have attempted that, and not for reasons of imagination. Every one of those characters is a separate clearance. Comics could afford them because comics were licensing paper, not casting actors and negotiating sequel participation for each one. The comic is not a consolation prize for the movie. It is the same idea released into an environment where the rights were cheap enough to let it grow.
LUNA’S AUTOPSY
Fans argue about crossovers the way children argue on a playground. Put them in the same room, tell me who walks out. The studios experience the identical conversation as a term sheet: billing, ownership, character protection, ending approval, sequel rights, and what percentage of the back end goes to a partner you did not pick and cannot fire.
THE REAL MONSTER WAS THE DEAL
Freddy vs. Jason barely survived being a two party negotiation, and both of those characters lived at the same company by then. Adding Ash created a triangle where every corner had something to lose and only one corner had a script. The movie did not fail because the idea was bad. It failed because the idea was worth too much to too many people at once.
TWENTY YEARS LATER
Look at what happened to the survivors. Paramount is now developing a new Nightmare on Elm Street film after acquiring U.S. rights to adapt Wes Craven’s original screenplay from his estate, while New Line retains the franchise’s international rights. Jason spent years split between Victor Miller and Sean Cunningham until the courts sorted out who owned the drowned boy and who owned the man in the mask, and Crystal Lake is scheduled to bring the Voorhees family back to Peacock on October 15, 2026. The current Evil Dead films, meanwhile, are being released domestically through New Line under Warner Bros. After all these years, pieces of Freddy and Ash’s cinematic worlds finally sit beneath the same corporate roof. They still do not share a movie.
Freddy survived fire, holy water, and his own daughter. Jason survived drowning, electrocution, Manhattan and a spaceship. Ash survived a haunted cabin, the fourteenth century and his own right hand.
The crossover survived one meeting.
