Bruce Campbell reveals why Ash Vs Freddy Vs Jason movie never happened

Man, the 90s and early 2000s were a great time for crossovers and horror movies, especially in comic books and no-one benefitted more from this than the Evil Dead series.

The Evil Dead comics saw Ash Williams take on Re-Animator, Xena: Warrior Princess, Marvel Zombies and Freddy and Jason and that last one also happened on the big screen… after all, Freddy and Jason fought onscreen in 2003, so why not have Ash Williams in there too?

Well, did you ever read about how difficult fights are in the Fast & Furious movies because the egos of the cast are so out of control that, for example, Vin Diesel can’t lose a fight and if he’s punched three times in a fight, he needs to hit his opponent that amount too… well, imagine if you have the likes of the Rock, Jason Statham and Diesel all under the same kind of contract, well, it seems it’s the same thing with Hollywood’s most notorious killers.

Bruce Campbell returning to Evil Dead in animated series as two new live-action movies confirmed

In a recent interview with Sam Roberts on his radio show Ash star Bruce Campbell explained that the idea of having ASh Vs Freddy Vs Jason was big… for about five minutes.

“It was a lovely five-minute phone call with New Line… they were our first distributor of Evil Dead,” Campbell explains.

It seems that because New Line owned Freddy and Jason but not Evil Dead, Ash Williams was going to be a character who wasn’t going to be able to do all the things that makes him Ash Williams… ie chainsawing the heads of monsters.

“They [New Line Cinema] do Jason vs Freddy, they do that, they go, ‘How about Jason vs Freddy vs Ash?’ Won’t that be great?

Evil Dead Rise cameo may have pathed the way for Bruce Campbell to return as Ash Williams…

“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.'”

He goes on: “It’s sort of like when superheroes fight. What’s the point of Batman fighting Superman? There’s no point. Even though Superman could have squeezed his head like a zit.”

Since Ash is an anti-hero/good guy, Campbell believed that he should ‘win’ against two monsters such as Freddy Kruger and Jason Vorhees and he’s right but sadly, the studio didn’t agree.

“Ash is the only good guy of all these horror series,” Campbell goes on, “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.”

He goes on: “Creatively, it was bankrupt, and now you’re sharing nothing with three other parties, two other franchises. You think they’re gonna wanna play nice? No. We all said no. It was very quick. Why would we do this? To make Ash look like he’s ineffective?”

After 1992’s Army of Darkness took the Evil Dead trilogy out on a much more overtly Looney Tunes type of note, the series moved away from it’s balls-out horror roots and anything looked possible and it stayed that way until Fede Alvarez’s 2013 reboot – although the 2015 series Ash Vs Evil Dead kept the more cartoony element alive (no pun intended) – so, perhaps, while I can’t help being a little giddy about the idea, an Ash Vs Freddy Vs Jason movie, while fun on the big screen, might not have done the franchise any favours in the long run.

So yeah, it looks like the egos of these monsters – and Ash – derailed this true Multiverse of Madness.

Let me know your thoughts, guys.

Jason Vorhees is an Evil Dead deadite! Confirmed!

Source: Fangoria