Paramount wakes up from competing Elm Street reboots nightmare

Warner Bros. hoped to make Lee Cronin's Nightmare On Elm Street, but after the Paramount acquisition, Skydance chose its in-house version of a new Freddy Krueger movie.

Paramount wakes up from competing Elm Street reboots nightmare

In a nightmare that not even the striped-sweater-and-fedora-wearing child predator could dream up, the bake-off between A Nightmare On Elm Street reboots, pitting Freddy Krueger against Freddy Krueger, has a winner: Freddy Krueger. Per Dread Central, Paramount Primal will remake the long-gestating new version of the classic slasher series, which, ironically for a movie about a burned-up killer, has been on ice since the 2010 reboot scared off any hopes of a sequel. Warner Bros. had a competing pitch from Mummy-maker Lee Cronin. But after Lee Cronin’s The Mummy left audiences saying “Who’s Lee Cronin?”, Paramount opted for its in-house version based on Wes Craven’s original screenplay and with the blessing of his estate over Lee Cronin’s A Nightmare On Elm Street. 

Previously, Puck reported that Warner’s former film heads Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy dreamed of sending Cronin’s Freddy into production before Paramount got into bed. However, in a nightmare of corporate mergers and acquisitions, Paramount agreed with the Craven estate on a reboot in July and successfully bought Warner Bros. a few months later. After De Luca and Abdy’s pretty dismal year at the box office, Paramount replaced them with Skydance Motion Picture co-CEOs Josh Greenstein and Dana Goldberg, clearing the way for an Ellison-approved Nightmare On Elm Street.

 
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