Online phenomenon The SCP Foundation Wiki was always going to be a tricky prospect for studios to tackle. Unlike some online works that have bubbled up out of the ‘net’s collective consciousness over the last 20 years—including the Backrooms mythos that YouTube-filmmaker-turned-A24-director Kane Parsons brought into the mainstream multiplex this summer—the various organizers of the vast and insanely inventive SCP Wiki have always had a pretty clear handle on ownership and copyright, releasing the entire archive under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license. Which means, among other things, that derivative projects based on those works—like, say, Hollywood films—are also covered under the license as a matter of course.
And while, as a rule, studios don’t really like releasing their very expensive movies straight into the Creative Commons, it sounds like indie distributor Neon is gearing up to do exactly that. This is per Deadline, which reports that Neon has just become the second small studio in a month to decide to wade into SCP waters, with its own film based on the group’s mythos now set to enter into what sounds like direct competition with the V/H/S/: SCP movie that rival A24 climbed aboard a few weeks back. Unlike the A24 film (which is being developed by Image Nation Studios and Spooky Pictures) though, Neon has reportedly actually done the SCP Wiki the courtesy of at least reaching out to its organizers to give them a heads-up about the movie.
This is per a statement put out today by The SCP Foundation Wiki Admin Team, which noted that, while it doesn’t grant any kind of “official” status to the movie—it’s apparently site policy not to give that endorsement, period—the organizers are “satisfied that Neon intends to follow the requirements of the CC BY-SA license,” and understand what that means for the film’s copyright status. The statement stressed that “SCP Foundation Wiki staff is not involved in the writing or production of this film” beyond the same basic advice about the SCP Foundation body of work it gives to all “unaffiliated projects,” and that “No member of staff is receiving compensation or otherwise financially benefitting from this film.” The statement ends by noting that “The staff of the SCP Foundation Wiki and our community appreciate Neon’s excellent communication and commitment to following the requirements of our license as well as the spirit of collaboration at the core of the SCP Foundation project.”
For its part, Neon is pretty clearly trying to lean into that spirit itself, calling the movie an “open-source horror project.” There’s no word who’s actually working on the project yet, or when it’ll arrive in theaters, beyond a vague 2027 arrival.
If you’ve never indulged in it, The SCP Foundation revolves around an organization that obsessively catalogues and contains various objects, concepts, and creatures of supernatural power, with its assembled fictions running the gamut from chilling horror to heady sci-fi to something as deliberately silly as a little robot who really loves to touch hamburgers. The archive was created in 2008, and features contributions from hundreds, if not thousands, of writers and artists at this point.
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