Scream 7 directors new and old weigh in on franchise's messy, sudden shift

Both former Scream 7 director Christopher Landon and current one Kevin Williamson have lent some thoughts to a new book about the franchise.

By William Hughes | August 20, 2025 | 9:18pm

Scream 6, Photo: Philippe Bossé/Paramount Pictures

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Scream 7 directors new and old weigh in on franchise's messy, sudden shift

Two years after the situation surrounding Scream 7—or, at least, its first incarnation—fell apart, personal reactions regarding the general clusterfuck that erupted when star Melissa Barrera was fired from the series have finally begun to emerge. Co-star Jenna Ortega opened up about her own departure a few months back, for instance, noting that Barrera being fired (over social media statements in support of Palestine, and which production company Spyglass labeled as “hate speech”) was essentially the last straw in a general sense that their little rebooted sub-franchise was “falling apart.” Director Christopher Landon—who’d come to the series after directing the Happy Death Day movies, and was taking over for fifth and sixth movie directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett—has talked about receiving death threats against both himself, and his family, harsh enough to catch the attention of the FBI. Now, new excerpts from an upcoming book on the series, Your Favorite Scary Movie, has seen Landon go into even more detail about how the whole thing collapsed.

This is per Entertainment Weekly, one of several outlets publishing excerpts from Ashley Cullins’ new book, which examines the whole history of the franchise. That includes the Scream 7 debacle, with Landon noting that he formally told Spyglass he was bailing on the project about a week after Barrera’s firing was announced. (Which means, among other things, that people were largely screaming at him online over a job he’d already quit: “They were all screaming at someone who wasn’t even on the movie anymore,” Landon says in a quote. “There were a lot of people who thought I was some sort of villain. That really got in my head. It was painful, and it was painful to lose a dream job in such a sudden and bizarre way.”)

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Landon also makes it clear that the writing was on the wall pretty much from the minute Barrera’s firing was revealed to him, and that Scream 7, as he’d conceived it, simply couldn’t happen without her and her character: “There was no movie anymore. The whole script was about her. I didn’t sign on to make ‘a Scream movie.’ I signed on to make that movie. When that movie no longer existed, I moved on.”

Of course, Landon isn’t the only person—or even the only Scream 7 director—interviewed for Cullins’ book. Excerpts featuring long-time franchise writer Kevin Williamson (who’s stepping into the director’s chair with Scream 7, now with original star Neve Campbell in tow) have also popped up on Bloody Disgusting, and paint a much rosier, if unsurprisingly backwards-looking, portrait of the franchise’s future: “Neve wants to go back to the first one and find the suspense and really concentrate on scary and not bloody,” Williamson asserts. “She was smart. She goes, ‘This is the time to do it because we’re moving away from New York. We’re going back to Sidney’s life. This is the time to reset a little bit. And I’m like, ‘Yup, let’s do it.’” Certainly, it sounds like Spyglass was willing to toss out whatever work Ortega, Barrera, Bettinelli-Olpin, and Gillett had been building together—often quite lucratively—on the new version of Screamin order to get back to perceived basics; whether fans will agree that the new film hits those “suspense” notes and lands at “scary” instead of “bloody” will become a lot clearer once Scream 7‘s February 2026 release date arrives.