Scream 7 is officially in theaters, it officially opened to a franchise-best $64 million, and we are officially sitting here with a very large iced coffee trying to figure out how to feel about all of this. Because it is complicated. It is messy. And it is frankly one of the most dramatic behind-the-scenes stories Hollywood has served us in a very long time.
Let’s start with what everybody already knows and then get into the juicy part — because the juicy part is deeply juicy.
Scream 7 opened February 27, 2026, and if you’re looking for Jenna Ortega? Not there. Melissa Barrera? Not there. The directors who made the last two films? Also not there. The entire storyline those films were carefully building toward? Gone. Poof. Vanished like a Ghostface mask in the third act. The movie that actually exists stars Neve Campbell as Sidney Prescott, living a quiet domestic life in Indiana with a husband and three kids before — you guessed it — Ghostface chaos finds her again for the fifth time.
Is that a bad movie? No, actually. But it is a completely different movie than the one that was supposed to exist. And once you find out what the original plan was, your brain might actually short-circuit a little.
Movie.Takes (@Takes2Movie) took to X to share, “Acting star Jenna Ortega who plays (Tara Carpenter) in ‘SCREAM 5’ and ‘SCREAM VI’, reports show that her character would have been killed off early into the film, or opening scene of ‘SCREAM 7’.
• Original plan was to be a trilogy where Tara’s death would crush the hold that kept Sam from acting on sinister, “Billy Loomis-like” impulses, from the previous two films. 🔪🩸”
Acting star Jenna Ortega who plays (Tara Carpenter) in ‘SCREAM 5’ and ‘SCREAM VI’, reports show that her character would have been killed off early into the film, or opening scene of ‘SCREAM 7’.
• Original plan was to be a trilogy where Tara’s death would crush the hold that… pic.twitter.com/lm0B5T8sVY
— Movie.Takes (@Takes2Movie) March 3, 2026
HERE’S THE FULL TIMELINE OF CHAOS, BESTIE
November 2023 — Melissa Barrera is fired. Spyglass Media drops her over social media posts about the Israel-Palestine conflict, citing a policy against “antisemitism or the incitement of hate in any form.” Barrera responds: “First and foremost I condemn Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Silence is not an option for me.” The internet goes absolutely feral.
Late 2023 — Jenna Ortega exits. The official story is Wednesday scheduling conflicts. Spoiler: that was not the whole story. Stay with us.
December 2023 — Christopher Landon leaves too. He was brought in to replace original directors Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, and then received death threats from fans who mistakenly believed he was behind Barrera’s firing. He wasn’t. He talked about the whole nightmare in Vanity Fair in April 2025. The man deserves a hug and a fruit basket.
2024–2025 — A whole new production gets built from scratch under entirely new creative leadership. No original stars. No original directors. No original plan. Just vibes and Neve Campbell’s excellent bone structure.
WHAT WAS THE ORIGINAL PLAN ACTUALLY???
Okay this is where it gets WILD. Skeet Ulrich — yes, Billy Loomis himself — confirmed the original three-film vision in a December 2025 interview with Entertainment Weekly and we have not recovered since. His exact words: “When we talked about coming back for 5, it was a three-picture arc for Billy Loomis to slowly turn his daughter into the killer. Obviously, those things didn’t pan out.”
A THREE-FILM ARC. In which SAM CARPENTER BECOMES GHOSTFACE. That was the plan!!
Suddenly those de-aged Billy Loomis flashback sequences from the last two films — the ones that some critics called tonally weird — make complete sense. They weren’t nostalgia. They were setup. They were building to something that we are now never going to see, and we are choosing to grieve this openly and without shame.
Gillett and Bettinelli-Olpin described their vision in a February 2026 EW interview and it sounds like it would have genuinely messed us up. Bettinelli-Olpin said the tone was going to be “going to f— you up.” Gillett described it as “ultra-contained, almost continuous, like minute-to-minute.” Think their film Abigail — single location, near-real-time — but with Sam Carpenter snapping and trapping Sidney and Gale somewhere. A pressure cooker. A reckoning.
And Tara? According to a Cinemablend report citing the YouTube channel Beyond the Mask, she would have died early — possibly in the opening sequence. Her death would have been the breaking point that finally pushed Sam over the edge. The one person she spent two entire films protecting, gone, and Sam loses herself completely. It would have recontextualized everything. We are not okay. We said what we said.
AND WHAT HAS JENNA ORTEGA BEEN UP TO, YOU ASK
Credit: ‘Scream 7’: Courteney Cox Reunites With ‘Friends’ Co-Star for Slasher Sequel
Living her absolute best life, actually! In April 2025 she told The Cut the real reason she left, and it had nothing to do with scheduling: “It had nothing to do with pay or scheduling. The Melissa stuff was happening, and it was all kind of falling apart. If Scream VII wasn’t going to be with that team of directors and those people I fell in love with, then it didn’t seem like the right move for me in my career at the time.”
Respect. Full stop. Meanwhile she’s been busy: Wednesday season two, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice with Tim Burton in 2024, and a string of projects that are genuinely using her range in ways Scream never fully got around to. She has also become one of the most interesting people to interview in Hollywood right now, which is a glow-up we are fully here for.
SO IS THE MOVIE WE ACTUALLY GOT… GOOD?
It’s fine! It is genuinely fine! Neve Campbell is doing real work here — Sidney’s arc is quieter and more domestic than the Carpenter sister era, and Joel McHale plays her husband Mark Evans while Isabel May plays their teenage daughter Tatum. Campbell sells every second of her return with real conviction and the film has emotional coherence.
But “reheated horror-movie comfort food” (MovieWeb’s words, not ours — well, now also ours) is not an unfair description. The $64 million opening weekend means the franchise survived. The reviews mean it didn’t exactly thrive. And the question now is whether Paramount looks at that number and says “great, more of this” or looks at everything that got lost and decides to rebuild something with actual creative ambition behind it.
Both versions of this movie had appeal. The one that exists is fine. The one that will never exist sounds like it could have been genuinely great. That gap is the whole story, and it is going to live in our heads for a while.
Go see it if you haven’t. Form your own opinion. And then immediately go read Skeet Ulrich’s EW interview and Jenna’s Cut piece back to back, because that combination will hit you in a very specific way that we cannot fully explain but absolutely promise is worth it.
