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This is from someone who kind of liked Scream 4… I don’t need a Scream 5. Back in November I wrote up a small piece talking about how incredulous Wes Craven seemed that there would even be sufficient demand for a fifth movie. That was when Craven wrote on Twitter, “No news on ‘Scream 5′ yet. You guys really want another one?”
It just seems like there’s no momentum on the project. The other day Collider asked Neve Campbell what she thought about the film’s chances and she answered, “We’ll see. I’m not sure they’re going to make it, to be honest. If that were to come up again and they were to approach me, I’d have a chat with them about it.” This is a polite way of saying she thinks this movie is in no way a priority for Dimension right now, and she’s probably right.
I think this is starting to teeter into Ghostbusters 3 territory, where a core group of people who loved the first installments of a franchise are clamoring for a new one. Of course there are some differences here (it’s been 2 years since Scream 4, not 20). But I feel like both franchises have, for different reasons, been irretrievably sucked into the vortex of diminishing returns. Too many people need Scream 5 to be too many different things. A reboot? A straight sequel? Do they kill the original cast? Do they make it found footage? There are almost too many options and with this many cooks in the kitchen it’s impossible to come up with a unifying take. Remember how Scream 4 didn’t really focus on an angle? It would just bring up a new thesis, drop it and then pick up another one? It would take a miracle to keep Scream 5 from exacerbating that issue.
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Look at the Ghostbusters 3 they’re about to make. The characters are written to be too fat to get into their clothes. Egon is blind in one eye. It sounds horribly depressing. And “passing the torch” to “give it new energy” is just pablum, the reality is that these brands are far too valuable for anything creative to actually happen with them – even with a new cast. And Scream 4 started to head into that territory. This was a movie in which Dewey was neither shot nor stabbed but beaten with a bedpan. I’d be praying for a new movie that comes out of left field and surprises me, like Scream did (and like Ghostbusters would have if I could remember seeing it in theaters).
Do you really want Scream 5? Or do you just want something that recaptures the energy of the first Scream? Because I can promise you that those two things are not the same movie.
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