After two tremendous successes with 2022’s Scream and this year’s Scream VI, directors Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin will be handing the reins of the franchise over to Happy Death Day 2U and Freaky director Christopher Landon, as confirmed by The Hollywood Reporter. The directors, along with producer Chad Villela, will serve as executive producers on the new film, with their exit from directing the franchise being due to their commitments to an Untitled Universal Monster movie. Both the Universal Monster Movie and Scream 7 are currently on hold due to the writers’ and actors’ strikes, with it currently being unclear who could script the upcoming sequel. While James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick wrote both Scream and Scream VI, Landon has written his Happy Death Day films, Freaky, and his most recent project, Netflix’s We Have a Ghost.
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Landon being tapped to helm a new Scream pays off his wishes from 2019, when he expressed his passion for the franchise, though it was a franchise that had laid dormant for years.
“Scream is an amazing franchise, especially the first movie, which blew my mind when I saw it back in the day,” Landon shared with ComicBook.com previously. “And I think [writer] Kevin Williamson is so crazy talented and also a friend of mine. I also just think that there are a lot of stories to tell and I think that when you step back into a franchise, you better be doing it for the right reasons and it better be because you have a really good story to tell. And so I think there’s sometimes an unnecessary appetite for sequels and reboots. If you’ve got a cool story to tell, yeah, go for it, man. But otherwise, let’s just do something new.”
Interestingly, this directing news comes on the birthday of the late filmmaker Wes Craven, who directed the first four Scream films. Given Craven’s inherent influence over the entire franchise, many fans had given up hope of ever getting a new installment.
“It’s the granddaddy of meta-horror, meta-slashers,” Landon expressed. “But what’s interesting about watching how the trends move, I think [2018’s] Halloween was so successful as a reboot/sequel because it wasn’t attempting to be anything but very genuine. And, it was, in many ways, good fan service, but it was also like, ‘We have a character-driven story to tell here.’ And so that, for me, is like, there’s a reason to make that movie. That’s not just a cash grab.”
Stay tuned for details on Scream 7.
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