As Scream 7 rolls out into theaters this weekend and the reactions aren’t quite stellar, some are lamenting what could’ve been. Before Kevin Williamson became director, this was to be helmed by Scream 5 and 6 duo Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, aka Radio Silence. The two had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts with their vampire Abigail, but the pair have dropped some hints about what they’d have done.
By their own admission, the pair never got their hands on a Scream 7 script, but they had some ideas they wished to follow through on. Bettinelli-Olpin told Entertainment Weekly they “talked a lot about, ‘How hard can we go with this?’ For us, it was always this idea of, [if] Scream VI is like a secret feel-good movie, Scream 7‘s going to fuck you up. That was as much as we ever got to.”
We have an idea of what that’d have entailed: a few months ago, Skeet Ulrich revealed the plan was for Melissa Barrera’s Sam Carpenter to become a Ghostface after surviving two attacks in 5 and 6. Presumably, that would’ve meant some bad times ahead for her sister Sam, the Meeks-Martin twins, and the rest of the would-be victim pool. But along with the Final Girl inversion, it seems that’d have led to a change in scale.
“[Scream 6] expanded just by going to New York,” acknowledged Gillett, “so the other thing Matt and I talked about was doing the opposite for Scream 7. Like, shrink it down and make it this like ultra-contained, almost continuous, like minute-to-minute thing.” This “stupid idea” was something they thought up without any writer input—but hey, maybe it could’ve been an interesting swing?
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