Freddy Krueger hasn’t been in a movie since 2010. Now he might be in two of them at once — and they’d come from competing studios racing each other to Elm Street.
Puck News reported Thursday night that Warner Bros. is actively developing its own “A Nightmare on Elm Street” remake, with “Evil Dead Rise” director Lee Cronin in talks to write, direct, and produce the project. The move comes just weeks after Paramount announced its own Elm Street revival through its new genre label, Paramount Primal, in partnership with the Wes Craven estate. Two studios, one franchise, and a rights situation messy enough to give anyone nightmares.
The confusion traces back to how the IP got split in the first place. When Wes Craven died in 2015, attorney Marc Toberoff helped his family — widow Iya Labunka and son Jonathan Craven — reclaim the domestic rights to Craven’s original screenplay. Paramount struck a deal with the estate for those U.S. rights earlier this month, giving its Primal label first crack at the franchise domestically, Variety confirmed. What Paramount doesn’t have is the international side. Warner Bros., through New Line Cinema, still holds the franchise’s rights outside the United States — and rather than wait to see how the Paramount situation resolves, studio chiefs Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy have decided to move ahead on their own version, World of Reel reported.
Two Very Different Projects
The creative differences between the two versions are apparently as significant as the rights split. Paramount’s deal with the Craven estate reportedly limits the studio to a relatively faithful adaptation — essentially a shot-for-shot remake of the original 1984 film, per World of Reel. Warner Bros., working without estate involvement after their own negotiations with the Craven family broke down, would have more creative freedom to take the story somewhere new, per Dread Central.
Cronin is an interesting choice for the Warner version. His “Evil Dead Rise” delivered one of the stronger horror films of recent years by taking a familiar franchise somewhere genuinely brutal and unexpected, which suggests the studio is betting on reinvention rather than nostalgia. Dread Central noted he’s currently also attached to a new “The Mummy” project, making his schedule a potential complicating factor.
Bloody Disgusting put the situation in historical context worth keeping in mind: Robert Englund himself explained last year that the Elm Street rights had been tangled for so long precisely because “so many people involved have a piece of the action” — including everything that passed through Ted Turner’s company before landing at Warner Bros. decades ago. That prediction turned out to be exactly right, just not in the way anyone expected.
The Merger Wrinkle
What makes this stranger still is the corporate backdrop. Paramount is currently in the process of being acquired by Warner Bros. — a merger that remains on hold and could close sometime next year. If it goes through, both projects would effectively fall under the same roof, and the race would become moot. But neither studio is apparently willing to wait that long, and CBR noted that if the Warner version moves faster and reaches screens first, Paramount may simply walk away from its own version.
Paramount disputed that its domestic deal was contingent on the merger completing at all, telling the trades that the rights negotiation was handled independently and had nothing to do with any expectation tied to the Skydance deal.
The Playlist and Bleeding Cool both framed it the same way Thursday night: what started as one of horror’s most anticipated revivals has turned into a corporate standoff, with Freddy Krueger caught in the middle. Neither film has a confirmed cast, a release date, or a finished script. What they do have is a deadline neither studio set on purpose — each other.
