Apparently the only masked man with superpowers The CW doesn’t want to deal with is Jason Voorhees. Entertainment Weekly is reporting that the network has passed on both its Little Women reboot and its Friday The 13th spinoff series Crystal Lake Chronicles (calling it a ”working title” seems kind of cruel at this point).
“We had better pilots,” explained The CW president Mark Pedowitz to the Television Critics Association regarding the Friday The 13th series. “The bottom line is we felt we had stronger things to go with, and we didn’t go forward with it.” According to Pedowitz, the pilot was “well-written” but darker than they wanted it to be, presumably looking for a more family-friendly take on the vengeful zombie Mama’s boy. (Hard to imagine that a Friday The 13th reboot with less sex and violence didn’t take off.) The CW apparently didn’t think that the show would be sustainable, and would probably have to introduce a psychic foil or a body-jumping parasite early on in the show’s run.
That said, a long-form take on an ’80s slasher movie appears to be easy Emmy gold compared to the grim Little Women reboot that the CW also passed on. The “hyper-stylized, gritty adaptation” of Louise Marie Alcott’s classic 1868 novel was to feature the March sisters attempting to survive the filthy, dystopian streets of Philly rather than scarlet fever, as the author originally intended.
The CW’s Notebook adaptation is also struggling to get off the ground, and is looking for writers to try to crack the story. “I believe there’s a series there,” Pedowitz explained. After all, a series based on a Nicolas Sparks novel could give both The Sopranos and 24 a run for their money when it comes to killing off a favorite character every week.
Could this possibly mean that the gritty reboot trend is on its way out? Audiences will have to wait for that Tetris movie to find out.