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Inside the drowning of "Crystal Lake": How unpaid writers, inexperienced execs and questionable bookkeeping undid A24's planned ‘Friday the 13th’ TV series

TheWrap spoke to more than a half-dozen insiders intimately involved in the planned Friday the 13th series Crystal Lake, A24's first foray into IP.

Suddenly the hammer dropped on an $85 million show that A24 was producing for Universal’s direct-to-consumer streaming platform Peacock — the first piece of IP A24 has tackled in the studio’s pivot to more commercial projects, as TheWrap first reported last year. Two days after a notes call with Peacock where one of the streamer’s executives said the pitch was “exactly what we want to hear,” A24’s head of television Sam French and A24 partner Ravi Nandan abruptly fired showrunners Bryan Fuller and Jim Danger Gray, according to an individual with knowledge of the conversation. And this decision— which effectively halted development on what was meant to be the first new piece of “Friday the 13th” visual media, aside from some video games, since New Line Cinema released the feature film remake in 2009 — shocked those close to the series.

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