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Who Owns Friday the 13th?
In brief
Who owns Friday the 13th?
Nobody owns all of it, and nobody has since July 1, 2018, when a copyright termination took effect and cut the franchise along lines that match nothing in how anyone thinks about it. Victor Miller, who wrote the 1980 screenplay for a flat $9,282, owns that screenplay in the United States. Horror, Inc., the Massachusetts company that bought the franchise, owns the same screenplay in every other country, plus the copyright in the film made from it. And "Friday the 13th" is a live registered trademark belonging to New Line Productions, Inc., a Warner Bros. company.
And the man in the hockey mask belongs to none of them cleanly, because he is not in the screenplay Miller got back.
Five assets, and no single owner among them
Almost every account treats this franchise as one thing that one party controls. A US court has ruled on part of it, expressly declined to rule on another part, and has no jurisdiction over the pieces sitting in trademark law and foreign copyright.
Figure
One franchise, five separate property rights
1 · The screenplay, US
Victor Miller
Recaptured by statutory termination effective July 1, 2018, affirmed on appeal in 2021. Covers the treatment and every draft, minus one scene Miller did not write.
2 · The screenplay, elsewhere
Horror, Inc.
The statute reaches only rights arising under US copyright law. Every foreign grant in the same screenplay was left standing.
3 · The films
Horror, Inc. and its studio partners
The 1980 picture is a separate work, registered by its financier as author. All twelve films are derivative works made under the old grant, and survive the termination.
4 · The adult Jason
Unadjudicated
The masked adult killer is a creature of the sequels, not Miller's script. The court that returned the screenplay refused to decide who owns him, and none has since.
5 · The name
New Line Productions, Inc.
Trademark is a separate register. "Friday the 13th" for films and "Jason Voorhees" for costumes are both live federal registrations held by a Warner Bros. subsidiary.
Screenplay copyright, film copyright, character rights and trademark are four different regimes. Only the first has been decided.
How a $9,282 writing job became a copyright reversion
In 1979 the success of Halloween persuaded the producer Sean S. Cunningham to make his own low-budget horror film. He asked his friend Victor Miller, a Writers Guild member since 1974, to write it. The deal was papered on a WGA standard form titled "Writer's Flat Deal Contract" between Miller and the Manny Company, a Connecticut limited partnership Cunningham had formed. Miller's total compensation was $9,282. He wrote a treatment called "The Long Night at Camp Blood," then two drafts of a screenplay, working at his own home on his own typewriter and his own paper. Those small facts mattered enormously forty years later. courtlistener.com
The money came from Georgetown Productions, Inc., whose principal Phil Scuderi financed the picture in exchange for complete control of the screenplay and the film. In 1980 Manny assigned its rights in both to Georgetown, which registered the copyright listing itself as the film's author and the film as a work made for hire. Horror, Inc., a company owned by people new to the project, later bought the franchise from Georgetown and became successor in interest to both it and Manny.
| Date | Event | Effect on ownership |
|---|---|---|
| June 1979 | Miller signs a flat deal contract with Manny | No work-made-for-hire clause. The omission decides the case in 2018. |
| Summer 1979 | Georgetown Productions finances the film | Scuderi takes control and rewrites the closing scene. |
| May 1980 | Film opens; Manny assigns everything to Georgetown | Georgetown registered as the film's author. Eleven sequels follow. |
| 2016 | Miller serves termination notices | Horror and Manny sue for a declaration that the screenplay was work for hire. |
| July 1, 2018 | Second termination notice takes effect | The operative date. US rights in the screenplay revert to Miller. |
| Sept 28, 2018 | District of Connecticut rules for Miller | Miller declared sole owner of the screenplay copyright. |
| Sept 30, 2021 | Second Circuit affirms | The split becomes final and the franchise has two copyright owners. |
Horror Inc. v. Miller, No. 3:16-cv-1442 (SRU), decided by Judge Stefan R. Underhill and published in full by the Government Publishing Office. govinfo.gov
Everything turned on one narrow question. If Miller wrote as Manny's employee, the screenplay was a work made for hire, Manny was the author from the start, and there was nothing to terminate. If he wrote as an independent contractor, he was the author and could take his grant back. The plaintiffs argued that Miller's Writers Guild membership and Manny's status as a guild signatory settled it. Both courts disagreed: employment under the Copyright Act is decided by common-law agency principles, not labor law, using the thirteen factors from Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid. On appeal only three favored the production companies. gibsondunn.com
Miller was paid $9,282 for the screenplay. Thirty-nine years later the law let him take it back, but only inside one country.
What section 203 actually hands over, and what it does not
Congress built the termination right into the 1976 Copyright Act so that authors who sold work cheaply could claw the rights back after thirty-five years. It cannot be waived by contract. But it is bounded in three ways that decide this entire situation, and all three sit in the statute.
Territory
Section 203(b)(5): termination "affects only those rights covered by the grants that arise under this title, and in no way affects rights arising under any other Federal, State, or foreign laws."
Existing derivatives
Section 203(b)(1) lets a derivative work made before termination "continue to be utilized under the terms of the grant." The twelve finished films keep running. New ones are barred.
Scope
A notice terminates only the grant it identifies. Miller's identified the screenplay and its drafts, not the films, the sequels or anything created after 1979.
Statutory text as codified at 17 U.S.C. 203. law.cornell.edu
The practical position is therefore unusual. Inside the United States, Miller controls the right to authorize a new work based on his screenplay. Outside it, Horror, Inc. holds exactly the grant it always held. A new film built on that script needs Miller's permission to be released at home and Horror's to be released anywhere else. Neither can move without the other.
The monster is not in the screenplay
In Miller's treatment and every draft of his screenplay, Jason Voorhees is a boy who drowned. The killer is his mother. Jason never appears alive, and Miller wrote no adult version of him. The famous final shot, in which a disfigured child bursts out of the lake, was proposed by the financier Phil Scuderi over Miller's objection and written into the shooting script at Georgetown's insistence. That inserted scene, in the words of the appellate record, "gave birth to the character Jason as an immortal adult killer who returned from the dead, and to numerous sequels in the franchise." The rest came later still: Jason is not the killer until Part 2 in 1981, and does not put on the hockey mask until Part III in 1982.
The trial judge saw the problem coming and refused to touch it. Having declared Miller the owner of the screenplay, he declined to analyze how far Miller could claim copyright in "the monstrous 'Jason' figure present in sequels to the original film," and noted that Horror "may very well be able to argue that the Jason character present in later films is distinct from the Jason character briefly present in the first film." Adjudication of any copyright in the adult Jason, he concluded, "will have to await a ripe dispute with respect to that issue."
That dispute has never been brought. So the honest answer on the hockey-masked Jason is that ownership is undetermined. Horror, Inc. asserts it. No court has ruled.
One party owns the movie, another owns the monster, and a third owns the name on the poster.
The title belongs to Warner Bros.
Copyright and trademark are different registers, and here they point in different directions. The federal record is public and unambiguous.
| Mark | Owner of record | Status and coverage |
|---|---|---|
| FRIDAY THE 13TH | New Line Productions, Inc., 4000 Warner Blvd, Burbank | Reg. 1,791,417. Live, renewed February 2024. Class 9, a series of motion picture films. |
| JASON VOORHEES | New Line Productions, Inc. | Reg. 3,658,558. Live and renewed. Class 25, costumes and masks. First use claimed as May 9, 1980. |
| JASON UN1V3RSE | Horror, Inc., Newton, Massachusetts | Filed May 15, 2024. At least two were expressly abandoned in January 2025. |
Status and ownership taken from the USPTO's Trademark Status and Document Retrieval system. tsdr.uspto.gov
New Line was absorbed by Warner Bros. in 2008, and the address on the registration is the Warner Bros. lot. The company holding the exclusive right to call a motion picture Friday the 13th is neither the man who owns the screenplay nor the company that owns the franchise. Trademark does not give it the story or the copyrights; it gives it the sign. But where the title is most of the marketing, control of the sign is control of the release. That is why Horror, Inc. branded its 2024 relaunch "Jason Universe" rather than using the name of the films.
Why nothing got made for sixteen years
The last theatrical Friday the 13th film came out in 2009. The gap is usually blamed on the Miller litigation, and that is a large part of it, but the deadlock was structural rather than judicial. Any studio contemplating a new film had to assemble permissions from parties with no reason to agree.
Needed for a new film
US screenplay: Victor Miller.
Foreign screenplay: Horror, Inc.
The adult Jason: owner undetermined.
The title: New Line Productions.
Not needed
For the old films: nothing. All twelve keep circulating regardless.
A single owner: a deal among all four works. Waiting for consolidation does not.
There is also a studio layer that predates Miller entirely. Paramount released the first eight films between 1980 and 1989; New Line released the three that followed in 1993, 2002 and 2003; and the 2009 reboot was a joint venture in which domestic and international distribution were split between them. Two studios with partial claims is a poor foundation even before two copyright owners are added.
Where the franchise stands in 2026
The position has loosened, but less decisively than the announcements suggest. Confirmed and merely stated are worth separating.
Confirmed. In May 2024 Horror, Inc. announced a multi-platform relaunch called Jason Universe, its president Robert Barsamian saying the company was "excited to work with Victor Miller and Marc Toberoff on new projects." Naming Miller and his attorney is the clearest public evidence that the two copyright owners had stopped fighting and started transacting. joblo.com
Confirmed. A prequel television series, Crystal Lake, produced by A24 for Peacock, is scheduled for October 15, 2026. Eight episodes, showrun by Brad Caleb Kane after Bryan Fuller's 2024 departure, starring Linda Cardellini as Pamela Voorhees, the killer Miller actually wrote. tvinsider.com
Not confirmed. There is no greenlit feature film. In March 2026 Cunningham told TMZ that a treatment for an old-school Jason film was finished, that he and Miller had resolved their differences, and that he hoped the pending Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery merger would clear the remaining studio obstacle. A completed treatment is not a production. tmz.com
Not confirmed. The merger has not closed. Paramount's acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery remains pending, with an agreed outside date well into 2027. Until it does, the copyright side and the trademark side sit in different corporate groups.
Frequently asked questions
Does Victor Miller own Friday the 13th?
He owns the copyright in the 1980 screenplay, in the United States only, since July 1, 2018. He does not own the films, the trademark or the adult Jason. Abroad, the screenplay rights still sit with Horror, Inc.
Who owns Jason Voorhees?
As a copyright question it is undecided. The boy who drowned is Miller's; the immortal masked adult was created for the sequels, and the court that returned the screenplay expressly refused to rule on him. As a trademark question, "Jason Voorhees" for costumes and masks is registered to New Line Productions.
Why can the old films still be sold if the rights reverted?
Because of the derivative-works exception in 17 U.S.C. 203(b)(1). A derivative work made under the grant before termination may keep being used on the old terms. Making new ones afterwards is barred.
How much was Miller originally paid?
$9,282 under a Writers Guild flat deal contract. The Guild later recovered $27,396.46 for him over sequel and residual payments. Cunningham estimated in the litigation that Miller had received roughly $220,000 in total, an estimate rather than an audited figure.
Is a new Friday the 13th movie actually happening?
Not yet, on the public record. A television prequel is dated for October 2026. A feature exists as a completed treatment described by Cunningham in March 2026, with no announced studio, writer, cast or release date.
Key takeaways
The bottom line
- Victor Miller recaptured the US copyright in the 1980 screenplay on July 1, 2018, upheld on appeal in 2021, because he wrote it as an independent contractor rather than an employee.
- Termination under 17 U.S.C. 203 recaptures US rights only. Horror, Inc. holds the identical rights everywhere else, and all twelve films keep circulating under the derivative-works exception.
- The hockey-masked adult Jason is not in Miller's screenplay. He came from a scene the financier inserted and from the sequels, and no court has decided who owns him.
- The trademarks sit with a third party: FRIDAY THE 13TH and JASON VOORHEES are live federal registrations owned by New Line Productions, a Warner Bros. company.
- Nothing was produced for sixteen years because a new film needs all four permissions at once. Jason Universe in 2024 and the A24 series dated for October 2026 are the first signs the parties are transacting rather than litigating.
Final word
The most valuable horror property of the 1980s was assembled by accident out of a $9,282 script, a financier's rewrite of one scene, eleven sequels and a title someone else registered, and the law treats each of those as a separate thing owned by a separate person. That is not a loophole. It is what happens when a franchise is built by many hands and only one of them ever signs a proper contract.