A24 somehow making an SCP movie without anybody from The SCP Foundation involved

None, apparently: In a statement to The A.V. Club, The SCP Foundation Wiki Licensing Team wrote that, although members of the team have attempted to reach out to the filmmakers about the project, “We have not had any communication with the filmmakers, producers, or distributors for this project, despite our best efforts, and to the best of our knowledge they have not made any efforts to contact us.” They also called Deadline‘s claim of “worldwide rights” “incorrect,” citing the terms of the Creative Commons ShareAlike license the entire Wiki is released under.

Ownership is the big, flashing question mark hanging over all of Hollywood’s recent efforts to shove online horror into a theater-shaped box. On the one end, you have projects like Zach Cregger and Brian Duffield’s recently announced Siren Head movie, where the duo are working from clearly copyrighted materials licensed from artist Trevor Henderson. On the other, there’s A24’s own Backrooms, which, while based on director Kane Parsons’ YouTube-published short films, was clearly beholden to the communal setting Parsons was inspired by. The SCP wiki sits in a unique position between those two extremes: The Licensing Team’s statement noted that, while many derivative works have been made using the SCP name, all such projects are required to also carry the CC BY-SA license that the entire archive, and the idea of SCPs themselves, exists under. Among other things, honoring that license means A24’s movie would need to be released without “DRM or other effective technological measures that would prevent it from being copied,” and, probably most crucially, “They would not be able to establish any sort of exclusivity with respect to distribution”—meaning the film would be freely available to upload to YouTube, or even commercial streaming platforms, without the studio being able to say a word.

Which doesn’t seem like something A24 would just put up with—something the Licensing Team’s statement notes is a major reason Hollywood has never bit on SCP before, despite its online popularity. (While also making it wild that the filmmakers would specifically use the group’s name, instead of trying to fudge around it.) We’ve reached out to A24 to try to get a response to the Foundation’s assertion of the terms of its license; so, for that matter, has the Licensing Team, which had the following to say in conclusion:

We’d love to sit down with A24, Spooky Pictures, and other involved parties to discuss options for how they could make and distribute a film while complying with our license. We chose to release our project under a Creative Commons license to allow fans to tell their own stories as well as adapt ours. We chose the ShareAlike license to ensure that everyone who enjoyed those fan works would have the same rights as the people who created them. We’re getting frustrated with this whole situation and are disappointed that these filmmakers seem to have no interest in engaging with the authors or curators of the material they’re adapting.