Conceived as a darkly bloody satire of the derivative world of slasher franchises, Scream is now itself one of the longest running slasher franchises in history. To date, it’s produced seven films and a TV series over 30 years. (For sake of comparison: Halloween was less than 20 years old when the first Scream hit theaters in 1996.) Who was it that said you either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become a Ghostface?
The Scream series has mocked almost every conceivable aspect of horror film and fandom — except the world of development hell, where, ironically, several Scream sequels have spent a significant amount of time. Almost every single movie in the series since Scream 2 has premiered in a distinctly different form than its initial concept, as scripts were revised, writers were replaced, endings were reshot, and actors were fired.
Below you’ll find four notable Screams that were killed before they could escape into public view, like so many of Ghostface’s victims through the last three decades. (RIP.)
Kevin Williamson’s Scream 3
When Scream creator Kevin Williamson sold the franchise to Miramax — back when it was still just an idea of his called Scary Movie — he included outlines for multiple sequels. Williamson stuck around for Scream 2, but by the time Scream 3 came around he was busy on other projects. The producers then brought in Ehren Kruger to flesh out Williamson’s outline into a full script, but over the course of development, Scream 3 became an entirely different film than Williamson had conceived.
In 2013, Williamson told Entertainment Tonight that in his original Scream 3 story “the killers were basically a fanclub of Woodsboro kids that had formed because of Stab 1 and Stab 2 … They were all doing the killings and the big surprise of the movie was when Sidney walked into the house after Ghostface had killed everyone … and they all rose up. None of them were actually dead and they’d planned the whole thing.”
Williamson later repurposed some of his ideas from Scream 3 for his TV series The Following, and the killers’ motivations, with some major changes, also became part of Scream 4. But the “fan club” idea never made it into a Scream in quite this way.
The Original Versions of Scream 5 & 6
Scream 4 might have had an even more convoluted development than Scream 3. Kevin Williamson did write the script for that one — but then his script was heavily rewritten by others before and even during production. The movie eventually got a totally different ending than the one Williamson had planned. Williamson wanted Scream 4 killer Jill Roberts (Emma Roberts) to survive the film, and then to become a main character in two more sequels that would have formed a kind of trilogy within the broader franchise.
Director Wes Craven eventually shot a new ending with the Scream legacy heroes finally killing Jill after it initially appears like she’s gotten away with her crimes. (That’s because in the original script she had; the hospital revenge sequence that now concludes Scream 4 was a late addition.) In 2022, Williamson told Bloody Disgusting that had Jill survived as he intended, Scream 5 would have been about Jill in college.
“Then murders started on campus,” he explained. “And it was a killer who knew she was the killer from the last film. So the killer kept trying to expose her, so she would have to kill to keep it covered up. So it was killer meets killer. And Sidney was a professor at that school.” That’s a fun idea for a sequel!
Then, Williamson said, “Scream 6 was gonna answer whatever happened between Dewey and Gale,” with a smaller role for Sidney and bigger parts for Dewey and Gale. But Scream 4 got rewritten, Jill died, and the next Scream sequel didn’t arrive for another 11 years.
Scream VI Before Neve Campbell’s Departure
When Scream VI did finally debut in 2023, it was the first movie in the franchise without its central star, Neve Campbell. In the movie, her absence is explained by characters mentioning that in light of Ghostface’s latest rampage, Campbell’s Sidney has gone into hiding in order to keep her family safe.
That’s what we saw after Campbell decided to bow out of the movie after feeling like she was not being “valued” by the series. “I think it’s really important for us to be valued and to fight to be valued,” she explained. “I honestly don’t believe that if I were a man and had done five installments of a huge blockbuster franchise over 25 years, that the number that I was offered would be the number that would be offered to a man. And in my soul, I just couldn’t do that.”
Scream VI was so far along in its development by the time Campbell declined to return that the early scripts for the movie already included her character. HelloSidney.com has an entire post that details this version of the screenplay and how it differed from the final film; many of the changes are cosmetic (some of Sidney’s lines were given to other characters), but most fundamentally the movie would have been truer to the Sidney of earlier Screams — who does not seem like the type to hide from trouble.
In the script, when Sidney learns about Ghostface’s return, she leaves her family and heads to Manhattan, where she helps the younger characters figure out the killer’s identity and defeat him. She would have gotten a scene reuniting with Courteney Cox’s Gale Weathers, and helped defeat the latest Ghostface by dropping the same TV on him that she used to kill the first Ghostface lo those many years ago. (“Second time I’ve done that, if you can believe it,” was her scripted one-liner.)
The Original Scream 7 plan
After the success of Scream VI, producers quickly got to work on a direct continuation of the story. But the Scream 7 that in theaters in 2026 is totally different from the one that was first planned three years earlier. Since Scream returned in 2022, its overarching story followed sisters Sam and Tara Carpenter, played by actors Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega. (Sam is also the daughter of Billy Loomis, the killer from the original Scream.)
But then Barrera was fired from Scream 7, reportedly because of comments she made about the war in Gaza. Then Ortega left the project, supposedly over scheduling issues with her TV series, Wednesday. With both of his leads gone, director Christopher Landon then dropped out of the project as well.
Landon later said in an interview (via Entertainment Weekly) that the “whole script” for Scream 7 was “about [Sam]” and that his film simply wouldn’t work without her. (“I didn’t sign on to make ‘a Scream movie,’” he added. “I signed on to make that movie. When that movie no longer existed, I moved on.”)
Instead, Scream 7 focuses on Sidney and her daughter (Isabel May). One suspects, given the history of this franchise and its unmade sequels, we will eventually learn more about what that Sam-centric film would have been about.
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Every Scream Movie Ranked
Ghostface has slashed his way through more than two decades of horror movies. Here‘s how they all stack up against each other.