This Scream 7 Fan Theory May Reveal Why All These Dead Characters Are Back

Spoilers ahead! The cast of Scream 7 has grown to include many previous stars of the franchise, raising more and more questions about when this movie will be set and what it will be about. Last week, Matthew Lillard was officially added to the cast, joining returning stars Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, and Scott Foley. Assuming that Lillard is reprising his previous role as Stu Macher and Foley is reprising his role as Roman Bridger, the movie will have to explain how they are not dead. Some fans are speculating that the movie may be set in the past, revealing a fourth conspirator who has been working with Stu, Roman, and Billy for over three decades now.

Lillard played one of the killers in the first Scream movie back in 1996. After teasing the mystery out for over an hour, the movie finally reveals that Stu and his friend Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich) carried out all the murders. At first, they did it so that Billy could get revenge on Sidney Prescott’s mother for having an affair with his father, and the rest of the killings were meant to cover their tracks. Sidney killed both of them.

The plot thickened in Scream 3, which revealed that Sidney had a half-brother named Roman who also hated their mother, Maureen. Roman had helped put Billy and Stu on the path to their murder spree, and he returned in this movie to try and finish the job. Again, the movie ends with Sidney decisively killing Roman, leaving no room for him to return in a sequel.

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It’s possible that Lillard and Foley are in Scream 7 only in flashbacks, hallucinations, or dreams, but with both of them added to the main cast, fans are expecting more. Last week, Reddit user u/gonnablamethemovies proposed that maybe this movie will go all the way back to the beginning, when Roman and Stu were planning their murders with Billy. It could even reveal yet another conspirator, who could become the main antagonist of Scream 7.

The biggest issue fans have with this is that the movies would need to use CGI to digitally de-age Lillard and Foley to approximate their look as teenagers. This could be especially unnerving if they have a lot of screentime, as their casting indicates. There could be ways around this, but the ideas delve much deeper into speculation from here.

Scream 7 is filming now, and is slated for release on February 27th, 2026. At the time of this writing, you can stream the first three Scream movies on Max.