Friday the 13th Part 2 Deleted Scenes

Damn, so all that footage is rotting somewhere

Was there a specific reason why they ordered the footage to be destroyed? It's a travesty that things turned out the way they did. Also, didn't something similar happen with the Halloween movies and the violence in the later sequels or am I recalling that wrong?

Okay, that was the one then. For some reason, I thought 4-6 had this problem.

The Friday the 13th movies were an embarrassment to Paramount in the 80s. They made money, but being horror movies, they were something the studio heads weren’t proud of.

Without knowing officially, the reason could have been something as mundane as needing to clear shelf space. This would happen a lot in film archives. Happening as late as the 1990s is a worry given the Laserdisc market (and DVD by 1995) meant the release of special features, unrated and deleted for home media buyers.

The other factor could be a policy Paramount may of had about unrated and NC-17 films. If the trims were included again, the film still would not have passed with an R rating. When it came to horror, the studios were careful not to piss off conservative retailers at the like Wall-Mart and Blockbuster that didn’t carry NC-17 films.

Independent studios like New Line Cinema were a bit more cool about the home media market, which is why Jason Goes To Hell was released with “R” rated and “Unrated” versions on home video.

Paramount was a big studio more interested their next mega budget mainstream film and thought that no one would care about these films in the future, which is the misguided logic of “the adults” that has seen the distraction of most lost media through the decades (Just ask a Dr Who fan). Not only sort sighted, out right stupid.