Sorry, Scream 7, But Making Scream 6 Without Sidney Wasn’t The Mistake

The Scream franchise is in a very strange place. Scream 6, which released in 2023, was one of its most financially successful entries; it set the record for both best opening weekend and highest-grossing domestic total, topping out at $108 million stateside and $169 million globally. (The highest-grossing movie in the franchise overall remains Wes Craven’s original Scream, which made $173 million in 1996.) Building on that momentum, Scream 7 is, as of writing, tracking to break the opening weekend record.

But Scream 7 isn’t really a direct sequel to Scream 6 – in fact, it’s kind of an anti-sequel. The movie returns to longtime final girl Sidney, who wasn’t in the prior film after a pay dispute with star Neve Campbell, because Melissa Barrera’s 2023 firing and Jenna Ortega’s subsequent departure left it without its intended protagonists. Not only does the film abandon the Carpenter sisters’ storyline entirely, but Scream 7‘s story is structured around the idea that Scream 6 (i.e. a Scream movie without Sidney) was a mistake.

Unfortunately for this new movie, though, they’ve got it the wrong way around.

Scream 6 Was Right To Move On From Sidney, No Matter How Much Scream 7 Apologizes For It

Warning: Some spoilers for Scream 7 belowIt’s not unheard of for franchise movies, especially ones with a reputation for meta-commentary, to wink at past choices that didn’t quite work. The Deadpool films, for example, get good mileage out of mocking Ryan Reynolds’ previous version of the character in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. But how often does a franchise mock one of its successes?

Scream 7 makes numerous, critical references to the “New York” Ghostface attacks, and in my viewing, they landed awkwardly. The attitude toward Sidney’s lack of involvement in Scream 6 is so apologetic that I started to wonder whether in-world groveling was one of Neve Campbell’s conditions to return – but when Scream 7‘s ending reveals it was also the new Ghostface’s primary motivation, I realized it was something much more desperate. The filmmakers weren’t just very confidently assuming the audience will share the opinion that the franchise had gone astray, and is now finally back on track. They were trying to will that consensus into existence.

I couldn’t be further from sharing that opinion. 2022’s Scream, while fun, struggled with trying to have its nostalgia cake and eat it too. Scream 6 wasn’t fully free of that impulse, but it made the biggest strides toward becoming something new and breaking free of the meta-spiral that has kept every Scream sequel trapped in the shadow of the original. With the way the Carpenter sisters and the “Core Four” were being developed, it felt like the franchise was finally starting to look forward instead of backward.

Scream 7 undoes all that positive momentum in favor of making an alternate Scream 5 that more or less tried to repeat what Halloween (2018) did, and has the gall to repeatedly pat itself on the back for it. I can’t say I’m surprised that this movie currently sports the lowest Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores in franchise history. I won’t be shocked if the second weekend drop at the box office is steeper than usual, either. I went from excited about the future of the Scream franchise to completely disinterested after just one film. If you ask me, that’s a mistake worth using an entire movie to apologize for.