Paramount’s latest Ghostface outing has been one of the most troubled productions of recent years. Behold, the unlikely story of Scream 7. You’ve stumbled across the Film Stories Newsletter! To get this sort of thing in your inbox every Friday, subscribe here. Hello! BAFTAs! Scream! Madame Web 2? There’s so much news this week, I almost ... Gaza, death threats and the FBI | The fall and rise of Scream 7
Paramount’s latest Ghostface outing has been one of the most troubled productions of recent years. Behold, the unlikely story of Scream 7.
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BAFTAs! Scream! Madame Web 2? There’s so much news this week, I almost considered breaking my self-imposed five(ish) lines rule. I didn’t, you’ll be pleased to know. I wrote about Scream 7's production chaos instead. All rock ‘n’ roll at Film Stories Towers.
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TELL ME THE NEWS IN FIVE(ISH) LINES
🗡️ Scream 7 has us wondering if we like scary movies… Here’s our review.
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🔫 Christian Bale confirmed he’s in film-that-sounds-like-a-sneeze, Heat 2.
🏆 Robert Aramayo won a BAFTA! As did a few others. We’re excited.
🪦 Sony’s Spider-Man Universe isn’t dead! It’s Morbin’ time!
Emilia Perez, last year’s “Awards Season Villain” with a star who referred to the 2021 Oscars as an “Afro-Korean festival”, and accused variously of cultural appropriation, transphobia, and being unrepentantly awful, has a section of its Wikipedia page dedicated to “Controversy”. We’ve never worked in Hollywood PR, but we’d imagine that’s not ideal.
Scream 7, which arrives in cinemas this week, has not one “Controversy”, but multiple “Controversies”. Considering its own glitzy awards campaign hasn’t started yet, and the public haven’t had a chance to see whether it includes a musical number about vaginoplasty, this seems even less ideal. One of the highest-profile car crash productions of recent years (hello, Megalopolis), it’s worth a recap of how Paramount and producers Spyglass Media got into this pickle.
First, there was some residual fallout from the previous film. Neve Campbell, despite returning to the role of Sidney Prescot after 11 years for Scream (henceforth referred to as Scream V) was nowhere to be seen in Scream VI when agreements over her pay for the follow-up broke down. “There’s someone at the top who only thinks about money and that’s their prerogative,” she said later. Yowch.
Instead, Radio Silence’s film upped sticks and moved to New York, doubling down on the Carpenter sisters (Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera) as the future of the franchise with the newly-christened midpoint of a three-film arc. The film debuted to solid reviews and a franchise-best box office return in North America. The lesson, maybe, was that Scream’s brand – its uniquely effective blend of horror, mystery and fourth wall-breaking humour – was stronger than any one person involved.
So, when Barrera took to social media to condemn the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza in November of 2023, Spyglass Media may not have lost much sleep over the decision to fire the franchise’s new lead. Though undoubtedly the central protagonist of the last two films, her profile had been arguably eclipsed in the year-and-a-half since Scream V as Jenna Ortega vehicle, Wednesday, became one of Netflix’s biggest ever original series.
Still, her departure caused the kind of furore that makes PR teams sprint to the storm cellar. The film’s recently announced writer-director, Christopher Landon (Radio Silence having left to make vampire-ballerina flick Abigail for Universal) summed up the situation in a quickly deleted X post: “Everything sucks. Stop yelling. This was not my decision to make.”
The next day, Deadline announced Ortega, too, had left the project, in a move which “[had] nothing to do with the fallout from Melissa Barrera‘s firing yesterday”, and everything to do with scheduling conflicts with Wednesday season two. In 2025, Ortega confirmed to The Cut that this was bollocks.
“The Melissa stuff was happening, and it was all kind of falling apart,” she said. “If Scream VII wasn’t going to be with that team of directors and those people I fell in love with, then it didn’t seem like the right move for me in my career at the time”. Surprise surprise, Landon left a week later, calling the project “a dream job that turned into a nightmare,” though his departure wasn’t made public for another month.
“There were a lot of people who thought I was some sort of villain,” he said later, after the process had seen him receive so many death threats the FBI got involved. “That really got in my head. It was painful, and it was painful to lose a dream job in such a sudden and bizarre way.”
On Barrera’s departure, he added: “There was no movie anymore. The whole script was about her.”
The film accordingly underwent what Variety called “[a] full creative reboot”. Spyglass, having refused to cough up enough money to secure Campbell for Scream VI, found an eye-watering $7m to bring her in for some marketing crisis management. The cast soon filled out with franchise veterans, many of their characters seemingly recovering from gory ends: Matthew Lillard, David Arquette and Scott Foley are all listed on 7’s credits. Original film scribe Kevin Williamson was brought on board to direct his first feature since 1999’s Valedictorian thriller, Teaching Mrs Tingle. The producers also ditched its Roman numerals for Arabic ones, though that may be unrelated.
Originally slated to capitalise on the series’ positive momentum post-2022 revival, Scream 7 arrives in cinemas three years after its predecessor. But the scars of its public dismantling haven’t gone away. At the Los Angeles premiere on Wednesday, demonstrators coordinated by pressure groups Entertainment Labor for Palestine, CODEPINK LA and Jewish Voice for Peace-Los Angeles arrived to protest a film which remains mired in one of the world’s most polarising conflicts.
“We believe that Melissa Barrera is a part of the Scream community and that it’s our responsibility to speak out when a member of our community has been harmed,” protest organiser Nino Testa wrote in a statement shared by THR. “We refuse to let the franchise we love be used as propaganda for a genocide. We reject Hollywood’s racist blacklisting and censorship of any person who advocates for a free Palestine.”
Not that scandal seems to have hurt Scream 7 too badly; the film is aiming to generate the franchise’s second-largest opening weekend at around $60m – a hair’s breadth from the $66m earned by the last outing. As far as Paramount is concerned: how much does a “Controversies” page matter if they get money in their account?
Scream 7 is in cinemas now.
