Radio Silence Reveal Their Original Plans For Scream 7

While Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett left Scream 7 early on, they had big plans for the slasher sequel.

Scream 7 had a hell of an opening weekend, making an absolute buttload of money, even as it drew the worst reviews in the history of the franchise, with the Rotten Tomatoes consensus calling it “Less a return to Scream‘s roots than a disappointing creative regression, this seventh entry draws little blood with its dull knife of a script.” Brutal.

It is what it is, but there are a lot of what-might-have-beens swirling around Scream 7, given its troubled production history. Directing team Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, AKA Radio Silence, who helmed Scream (2022) and Scream VI (2023) departed the project early due to schedule clashes with their fun as hell vampire flick, Abigail. Then star Melissa Barrera got the boot for remarks she made online following the October 7 attacks. That prompted co-star Jenna Ortega to bail, followed by co-star Jenna Ortega, and finally replacement director Christopher Landon (Happy Death Day).

Eventually, original franchise co-founder Kevin Williamson settled into the director’s chair, with original star Neve Campbell front and center, and we got what we got for better or worse. But Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett at least jotted down some ideas for the film before they jumped ship, which they recently relayed to Entertainment Weekly.

“We never read a draft of any version of Scream 7 that we were going to do because we had left to do Abigail before that,” Bettinelli-Olpin said. “The thing that we had in our minds for Scream 7 was sort of like, ‘How hard can we go with this?’ It was the thing that we talked a lot about. For us, it was always this idea of, [if] Scream VI is like a secret feel-good movie, Scream 7‘s going to f— you up. That was as much as we ever got to.”

Gillet added, “Given that we expanded the sort of scope of the story by going to New York, the other thing that we had talked about — just Matt and I, by the way, it wasn’t a conversation with the writers — was, ‘How do you do the opposite for 7?’ Like, shrink it down and make it this like ultra-contained, almost continuous, like minute-to-minute thing. But outside of our own stupid idea, we weren’t privy to any plan beyond just, ‘There’s gonna be another one.'”

Scream 7 is in cinemas now.