It was back in 2011 that Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven reunited for Scream 4, at the time the first new installment in the franchise in 11 years. Williamson wrote the screenplay while Craven directed, though the fourth installment in the Ghostface saga wasn’t the hit the creative duo hoped it would be. And it would be another 11 years before Scream would return to the big screen, with a new creative team taking over in the wake of Craven’s passing.
But Kevin Williamson is back this year for Scream 7, the very first installment in the franchise that Williamson has himself directed. Williamson co-wrote the script in addition to directing, and he’s pulling the focus back to the characters he and Craven first brought to the screen 30 years ago. To say the least, the franchise has changed a whole lot since Scream 4 back in 2011, but the more things change, the more they end up staying the same. But I digress…
We’re here to talk about Scream 4 and Kevin Williamson’s original plans for his own fifth and sixth installments that would’ve followed in its wake. The plan at the time was for Scream 4 to launch a new trilogy, and Williamson reflects on those original plans in a chat with CinePOP.
Williamson recalls, “Scream 4 was about Emma Roberts and her character Jill. In my original conceit, Jill survived and went to college. And in college… she got away with it all… all the killings in Scream 4… and she was now the new Sidney. The new celebrity victim. And she was loving it. And someone figured her out, and started killing all the people in her life.”
“In order for her not to be exposed as the killer, she had to find the killer. And that was Scream 5,” Williamson reveals.
He continues, “And my Scream 6 was… now that Gale Weathers is trying to build a life without Dewey… because I would’ve killed Dewey too… I had planned to kill him as well… she was trying to rebuild her life and it was about her finding love. And in a weird way, she goes through exactly the same thing Sidney went through in Scream 1. She’s dating a man… is he or isn’t he the killer? She doesn’t know. So it was sort of the reverse.”
Of course, Jill ended up being killed off in Wes Craven’s Scream 4, while Dewey was many years later killed off in a very different version of Scream 5 than the one Williamson had intended to make. But no matter the timeline, Dewey dies in Scream 5. Sorry, David Arquette.
That said… Arquette is back in Scream 7! How, you ask? Find out this weekend.