Wes Craven’s 1984 slasher staple A Nightmare On Elm Street is to be rebooted again, this time at Paramount. While Paramount’s lawyers continue to hash out their hostile takeover of Warner Bros, the studio has also made another acquisition: the rights to Wes Craven’s original A Nightmare On Elm Street screenplay. It’s the first step ... A Nightmare On Elm Street remake in the works at Paramount
Wes Craven’s 1984 slasher staple A Nightmare On Elm Street is to be rebooted again, this time at Paramount.
While Paramount’s lawyers continue to hash out their hostile takeover of Warner Bros, the studio has also made another acquisition: the rights to Wes Craven’s original A Nightmare On Elm Street screenplay.
It’s the first step in what will eventually become another remake of the 1984 slasher classic – though at this early stage there isn’t a screenwriter or director attached.
The Nightmare On Elm Street franchise was previously associated with New Line Cinema, and it was Craven’s film – and his ghoulish creation, Freddy Krueger – that turned New Line from a small indie production company to the major Hollywood player that gave us the Lord Of The Rings trilogy. It also turned Robert Englund from a hard-working character actor into a horror icon.
Now, however, Paramount has secured the licence from Wes Craven’s estate, handled by Iya Labunka and Jonathan Craven; per Deadline, Paramount has the US rights for A Nightmare On Elm Street, while the international rights will remain with New Line.
It’s the first move from Paramount Primal, a new spin-off studio that will focus on making genre films; it’s headed up by producers JD Lifshitz and Raphael Margules according to The Hollywood Reporter – they previously brought us Zach Cregger’s suburban horror, Barbarian.
In a statement, Labunka said that the remake will bring the franchise – which got a string of sequels in the 80s and 90s – to a new generation of horror fans.
“We know that Wes would have been thrilled to see how horror is taking its long overdue place in the cultural canon,” the statement read. “We can’t wait for all of us to sit together in a dark theatre – around the campfire of today – as the next chapter of the Nightmare story unfolds.”
This isn’t, of course, the first time that A Nightmare On Elm Street has been remade. There was a 2010 version with Jackie Earle Haley playing Krueger, though as anyone who’s seen that film will attest, Robert Englund is a tough act to follow.
Before that, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) was itself a kind of soft reboot for the franchise, bringing back the original film’s stars Heather Langenkamp and John Saxon for a self-aware yarn in which Freddy begins menacing actors in the ‘real’ world. It wasn’t a huge hit, and so Craven moved onto another meta concept: 1997’s Scream, which deconstructed the cliches of the slasher genre and created its own long-running franchise.
Who will direct this latest Nightmare? Who will star in it? We’ll bring you more as we hear it.
