A lot has changed between Scream VI and Scream 7.
The 2023 film saw longtime lead Neve Campbell sit out after “the offer that was presented to me did not equate to the value I have brought to the franchise,” she said at the time; now she is back, after noting that she was “really grateful that the studio heard me when I talked about pay discrepancy.”
However, Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega, who starred in the fifth and six movies, have not returned, as Barrera was fired for posts about the Gaza war that Spyglass, the company behind the Scream franchise, deemed as antisemitic. Ortega and director Christopher Landon departed shortly after. (In response to that firing, pro-Palestine protesters marched outside of the L.A. premiere on Wednesday.)
That meant a big pivot, as the films had been based heavily around those two younger stars. Cue Kevin Williamson, who wrote three of the previous Scream movies and took the helm for No. 7 as both director and co-writer.
“I got a call from one of the producers, William [Sherak], and said ‘Well, we’re going to have to come up with something else,’” Williamson told The Hollywood Reporter at the premiere. That was of course made much easier once they knew Campbell had agreed to return.
“I’ve known Neve for 30 years, I knew what she wanted. Yes there was the salary dispute and paying her, but she’s also an actress and she wants to act. She wants a role,” he explained. “So we wanted to do a Sidney-centric film and catch up with Sidney Prescott all these years later and sort of see what she’s up to.”
That included exploring, “What’s her family like? What would happen if she had a daughter the same age that she was when this all started? How does she parent, how does she talk about the past?” Williamson continued. “She’s so traumatized, every conversation Sidney has ends in blood and guts. ‘Mom, what was your first time like?’ ‘Well it was the night all my friends got killed.’ ‘What was college like?’ ‘Oh, well, my first semester everyone got killed.’ It’s just not something you want to talk about, but if you have a daughter who desperately wants to connect with you, that’s a conflict that we establish in the movie.”
Isabel May plays Campbell’s daughter in the film, as she credited the veteran actress for advice on navigating the franchise’s fans: “She told me to be aware of the fact that there’s a huge fanbase that not only love these films but cherish them, it’s a huge deal to them. There’s a certain weight to that and I try to just have a little levity and enjoy it and not think about that because I want to just do my best and make them happy.”
The film also welcomes back a number of actors whose characters had previously died, including David Arquette, Matthew Lillard and Scott Foley. Foley’s Roman Bridger was killed in the third movie, so he admitted that getting a call to return was “bizarre, unexpected. I had put him away, as you should when a character gets shot in the forehead — you think, understandably, that they’re not coming back.”
And Foley admitted even he doesn’t know exactly how the film will pull it off, joking, “No one explained shit to me, and I’m still not sure how it’s going to work having not seen the film or read a script. So I am flying blind here” but is confident that Williamson will make it “scary and funny and edge-of-your-seat. He redefined the genre with the first one and has been able to keep it going.”
Scream 7 hits theaters on Friday.