Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, released in 1986, marked a significant shift in tone for the long-running horror franchise, which launched in 1980 with Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th. By turning Jason Voorhees into an unstoppable killing machine, the makers of Part VI opened the door for all kinds of wild possibilities. Suddenly, Jason could cut multiple people in half with one swing of a machete or kill the driver of an RV he’s hiding in and walk away from the ensuing crash completely unscathed. Those comedic undertones unfortunately didn’t carry through into the next sequel in the series, but it certainly wasn’t for a lack of trying.
As Jason Lives director Tom McLoughlin revealed on a 2017 episode of Post Mortem with Mick Garris, series producer Frank Mancuso Jr. initially approached him about doing a follow-up film before John Carl Buechler was hired for Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood. The idea Mancuso kicked around at that stage was for Jason to cross over with Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street. Although the characters were owned by different companies at the time (Jason by Paramount and Freddy by New Line), Mancuso said they would try to work out a deal anyway. When that didn’t go according to plan, McLoughlin realized that Paramount was also home to two other famous characters that Jason could potentially cross paths with.
“I said, ‘You know what, you guys own Cheech and Chong. What if we do Cheech and Chong meets Jason?’” McLoughlin said. “I could just see [them] in the forest and they’re like camp counselors or something, and it’s like, ‘Hey, man, is that Jason out there?’ ‘No, man, that’s a myth!’” In a 2017 interview with Bloody Flicks, McLoughlin elaborated on the idea by saying that he imagined the duo as “stoners living in the woods secretly running a weed farm.” Ultimately, McLoughlin and Mancuso agreed that the film likely wouldn’t have been scary enough and could have risked pissing off the fanbase as a result.
But even if they decided to pursue the concept further, the likelihood of the crossover coming to fruition wasn’t very good. The fact of the matter is, Cheech and Chong split up following the release of their 1985 album Get Out of My Room and only worked with one another sporadically prior to their reunion in 2008. So far, their getting back together hasn’t involved Jason in any way, shape, or form. Freddy, however, finally got his chance to face off with the masked killer in 2003’s Freddy vs. Jason, but only after the project spent many long years in development hell.
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