The Scream franchise is proving to be as implausibly unkillable as a whole bunch of completely regular people who just happen to be wearing stretchy-faced ghost masks tonight, with Bloody Disgusting reporting that a fifth film in the series (which last put out a new theatrical installment in 2011) is apparently in the works. The rights to the franchise—which almost single-footedly kick off a very lucrative breed of self-aware, meta-heavy horror movies for Dimension Films in the mid-’90s—have just been acquired by Spyglass Media Group, which also recently announced its intention to reboot the Hellraiser movies with David S. Goyer. (For those interested in the more nuts-and-bolts side of things, this incarnation of Spyglass was formed out of partnership with Lantern Entertainment, the company that scooped up all the assets of The Weinstein Company and its subsidiary Dimension after those companies went down in a flurry of self-inflicted wounds—hence how it acquired this particularly spooky set of rights.)
There’s no word yet on what this new film will serve up in terms of plot, though, or whether it’ll continue to follow the adventures of Neve Campbell’s shockingly murderer-attracting Sydney Prescott. It seems more likely, though, that it will follow in the footsteps of the MTV/VH1 TV show that first aired in 2015, telling a set of stories of its own.
One thing worth noting here is that, for a long-running horror franchise, Scream maintained a surprisingly high level of fidelity to its creative team; Craven directed all four of the original films, and Kevin Williamson wrote every installment except the third. Craven died in 2015, though, and, according to this same Bloody Disgusting report, Williamson won’t be working on the script. And so it seems inevitable that Scream will now pass into the hands of a new generation of writers and directors, ones for whom it is now an established horror classic, in the same vein as the various slasher flicks the original riffed on so nimbly back in 1996.
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