Bruce Campbell Reveals Why 'Freddy vs Jason vs Ash' Film (Thankfully) Didn't Happen

Playing with action figures is a lot of fun. You can let your imagination run wild. Superman can go from fighting a giant stuffed Olaf who you’re pretending is Lex Luthor and then he’s off to have tea in a fortress made from multi-colored blocks. But who’s that in the fortress with him? It’s the Ghostbusters (albeit without their proton packs because those keep breaking so you only take them out for special occasions). Normally, Clark Kent would not get to interact with Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz Winston Zeddemore, and Egon Spengler. When you’re playing with action figures, you can pair up whoever you have access to and it doesn’t even have to make sense.

That’s the great thing about your imagination: it’s limitless. No corporate lawyers are coming in to tell you that Lex Luthor can’t have a carrot nose. Bill Murray won’t withhold your ability to pair Superman with the Ghostbusters because his contracts don’t extend to your apartment. “Hey, Ghostbusters, it’s great to see you,” is all that needs to be uttered for the two parties to mix. You want to build some elaborate scenario as to why they’re drinking together? Be my guest. This is a play session not a $30 million movie starring two horror icons long after their appeal had diminished!

That was the case with Freddy vs Jason. Released in 2003, Freddy vs Jason is better than it has any right to be. It is not good! Ten other screenplays led to this film and they all probably would have been more interesting (read Slash of the Titans by Dustin McNeill). Regardless, the two eponymous leads pull an Itchy & Scratchy and fight and fight and fight. Jason slaughters 20-year-old high school kids while Freddy cracks wise (and brings Scut Farkus back from the dead). It delivers on what it promised, made a killing at the box office, and never saw a sequel. That doesn’t mean one wasn’t almost made.

New Line Cinemas made a meal out of the two horror icons being onscreen together for the first time. There was even a weigh-in in Vegas. The movie emphasized the fight as well (and little else). So, when the time came to develop a sequel, the idea was to throw another big horror name in there: Ash Williams. Ash, played by Bruce Campbell, was the lead character in three Evil Dead films at that point. Campbell was also no fan of New Line Cinemas, as he recently revealed on Sam Roberts’s radio show. Campbell had been approached to do Freddy vs Jason vs Ash, but it didn’t get far.

“It was a lovely five-minute phone call with New Line, who we called New Lies Cinema at that point,” Campbell explained. “They were our first distributor of Evil Dead. They gave us a check and that was the only check we ever saw. Ever. So thanks, New Lies Cinema.” Studios stiffing creatives when it’s time to pay up is nothing new. It would make sense if that was a driving motivation for Bruce to not want to work with them. But the actor made it clear that the “creative” direction of the film was none too enticing.

“They do Jason vs. Freddy, they do that, they go, ‘How about Jason vs. Freddy vs. Ash?’ Won’t that be great,” the actor noted. “So we started out pretty immediately being like, ‘Yeah, won’t that be fantastic? Ash can finally kill both of those assholes. Let’s just get it done.’ Long pause. Long pause. ‘Um, you can’t affect anything that happens to either of the other characters. You can’t kill either of them. You can’t even determine what really happens in the fights. So it’s going to be like fight by committee.’”

New Line being protective is what kept Freddy vs Jason from getting made, so who knows if anything would have happened even if Campbell and his friend and director Sam Raimi played ball. Regardless, as Campbell then points out, there is an expectation that would come with Ash being in a movie like this. “Ash is the only good guy of all these horror series. Yeah. So he needs to kill them. He would need to kill them, even if their eyes pop open at the very end and they cut to the credits like they normally do.” Boom, baby! Why have Ash in the movie at all if he can’t… be Ash?

With a movie like that, there need to be more developed reasons for what’s happening. Several early versions of Freddy vs Jason included teens trying to use Jason (a monster who was abused and murdered as a child) against Freddy (a murderous pedophile) in ways that felt interesting without getting too complicated, but still featuring some complex ideas. Freddy vs Jason threw away that complexity in favor of over-simplifying things in a way that was somehow more complicated. It sounds like Freddy vs Jason vs Ash would have gone the same route.