Scream Reboot Needs To Happen And Now Is The Perfect Time

While there are plenty of reasons we need a Scream reboot, let’s get the obvious one out of the way: simply put, the series has run out of familiar faces to bring back for future films.

Fan-favorite characters like erstwhile former Deputy Dewey (David Arquette) have been killed onscreen, and Paramount’s unwillingness to further negotiate with Neve Campbell meant she didn’t appear in the last installment and likely won’t be in future installments.

From the original movies, we’re basically down to Courtney Cox’s Gale Weathers, and that’s why the franchise tried to pass the torch to younger actors Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega.

Cue the drama: these two were brought in so Scream could have less of a reboot and more of a “requel,” but Barrera was let go from Scream 7 after her social media posts concerning the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

Shortly after that, news broke out that Jenna Ortega couldn’t star in the film due to her intense shooting schedule for the second season of Wednesday.

Now that Scream has lost most of its original characters and the two biggest new characters, it’s time to reboot and start clean with a brand new cast. 

While the drama surrounding Scream 7 is why we’re dishing about the need for a reboot, some of the problems plaguing the franchise have been around for a very long time.

The biggest example of this is that the killers just keep getting worse: in the original film, one of the two killers had a personal connection to Sydney Prescott, and that gave a very intimate motivation to his murder spree.

Later sequels kept returning to this well until it was dry, giving us new bad guys like the original villain’s mother and his secret mastermind in an attempt to explain why new people would be obsessed with the original victims. A Scream reboot could cure some of this.

In Scream (2022), we got the last truly clever variation on this in the form of young villains who want to improve the Stab films they love by committing grisly new murders and intentionally bringing back original characters as part of their parasocial preying.

However, one film later, Scream VI phoned things in by making the killer a parent of the previous killer…a lame retread that, frankly, Scream 2 did better.

If this is the kind of bottom-of-the-barrel villains we’re getting, then it’s time to reboot the franchise and make Ghostface scary again.

It’s also worth noting that because Ghostface has always been randos in masks, this franchise is much easier to reboot than other horror franchises like Hellraiser or A Nightmare On Elm Street that are so thoroughly associated with the famous faces behind their movie monsters.

Speaking of having bad guys in masks, part of what made the first Scream so compelling was trying to figure out who the killers were. The fact that there were two villains seemed revolutionary at the time, but that had an unexpected effect on future films.

In a franchise where one horror fiend painstakingly explains “the rules” of the genre, its fans quickly figured out the unwritten rules behind the plotting of each movie.

This turned future Scream installments into mysteries in which fans were more focused on figuring out who the killers were than on enjoying the kills themselves.

To make matters worse, fans got so good at this endeavor that the endings of each subsequent film became more predictable and, therefore, more disappointing (especially as online fan theories could ruin the films months before they came out).

If we finally get the badly needed Scream reboot, the franchise might finally transcend its status as a glorified murder mystery and do the one thing we didn’t think Ghostface could do anymore: surprise us.