Original “Scream 7” directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett recently sat down with Entertainment Weekly and shared some details about their unrealized vision for the horror sequel.
Although they knew they wanted to test the boundaries of “how hard we can go” with “Scream 7,” Bettinelli-Olpin said he and Gillet never got that far in development because they left the franchise to direct the 2024 vampire-thriller “Abigail.”
“We never read a draft of any version of ‘Scream 7’ that we were going to do because we had left to do ‘Abigail’ before that,” Bettinelli-Olpin said. “The thing that we had in our minds for ‘Scream 7’ was sort of like, ‘How hard can we go with this?’ It was the thing that we talked a lot about. For us, it was always this idea of, [if] ‘Scream 6’ is like a secret feel-good movie, ‘Scream 7’s’ going to fuck you up. That was as much as we ever got to.”
Gillet added, “Given that we expanded the sort of scope of the story by going to New York, the other thing that we had talked about — just Matt and I, by the way, it wasn’t a conversation with the writers — was, ‘How do you do the opposite for 7?’ Like, shrink it down and make it this like ultra-contained, almost continuous, like minute-to-minute thing. But outside of our own stupid idea, we weren’t privy to any plan beyond just, ‘There’s gonna be another one.’”
“Scream 7” follows Neve Campbell’s original franchise protagonist, Sidney Prescott, who relocates to the small town of Pine Grove for a quiet life with her daughter, only to have Ghostface return to tear it all down. Campbell stars alongside fellow original cast members Courteney Cox, David Arquette and Matthew Lillard, as well as Isabel May, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Mason Gooding, Anna Camp, Joel McHale and Mckenna Grace.
“Scream 7” hit theaters on Friday, and although Paramount and Spyglass are looking at a $60 million payday over opening weekend, it wasn’t easy getting the film off the ground. 2024 saw the exit of series stars Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega, as well as director Christopher Landon. Original “Scream” writer Kevin Williamson was hired as director in Landon’s place. The production also had to pay Campbell $7 million for her return after a pay dispute caused her to drop out of “Scream 6.”