A long dormant villain is about to return, but at least this time he’s fictional. According to The Hollywood Reporter, a new Nightmare On Elm Street movie is on the way from Paramount Pictures’ new horror and genre label, Paramount Primal. It’s not immediately clear whether this will be a remake of the 1984 original movie, as the 2010 remake was, or whether it’ll be some kind of new soft reboot of the franchise, as is the current trend. The movie is just described as something “set in the world of A Nightmare on Elm Street, based on the original screenplay.”
The original film came from an idea and script from director Wes Craven, who died in 2015. The rights to his story have been licensed by his estate, including his widow Iya Labunka and son Jonathan Craven; the estate regained the rights to the screenplay in 2019.
The original movie introduced the world to Freddy Krueger, a child killer who was killed by a vigilante mob who then sought revenge against his killers’ children. The original series is fairly all over the place tonally, from the closeted-sexuality horror of Nightmare 2 to the gothic elements of the fifth movie to a sixth movie that featured Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold to a seventh movie that helped pioneer the metahorror that Craven would further hone in Scream. The 2010 remake was intended to be something of a franchised reboot, but was received so hostilely that those plans were abandoned. Of course, that doesn’t seem like as much of a roadblock in 2026 as it once did, but with a franchise this expansive, hopefully they’re able to find something worthwhile in whatever version we get next.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.