“Scream 7” is getting a new director. TheWrap has confirmed that Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the filmmaking team known as Radio Silence, will be passing the baton to Christopher Landon after directing the last two installments of the franchise.
The horror vet behind both “Happy Death Day” films and “Freaky” will step in for the next chapter in Spyglass’s successful revival of the 1990s slasher series. Landon commented on the news with a tweet of his own on Wednesday, seen below.
The Radio Silence duo, which broke out in 2019 with Samara Weaving’s wedding night horror comedy “Ready or Not,” are currently working on an original horror film for Universal. Said chiller is to be headlined by Melissa Barrera. The “In the Heights” star has also been the prime protagonist/final girl in both “Scream” (the fifth film from 2022) and this year’s “Scream VI.” They earned decent notices and relative fan approval, along with — respectively — $139 million on a $24 million budget and $168 million on a $35 million budget.
Those two films arrived over a decade after the critically and commercially underwhelming “Scream IV,” which became Wes Craven’s final film and earned just $98 million on a $40 million budget. The late horror legend helmed the first four chapters of the comedic and often self-satirical slasher series. The first two marked the feature film breakout for screenwriter Kevin Williamson.
James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick wrote the scripts for the fifth and sixth installments, but Landon usually writes his own directorial efforts, including last year’s Netflix comedy “We Have a Ghost.” He also cowrote a few “Paranormal Activity” films while directing “Paranormal Activity 4.” That 2012 release was a breakout project for future “Freaky” star Kathryn Newton.
“Scream” and “Scream 2” were the first two R-rated slasher movies to pass $100 million, in 1996 and 1997, at the domestic box office. They also inspired a wave of slasher flicks starring a younger generation of would-be movie stars like “I Know What You Did Last Summer.”
“Scream 3” debuted in early 2000. With its intention to offer up a crew of younger protagonists undercut by the social backlash of the Columbine school shooting in 1999, the third chapter took the core surviving trio (Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox and David Arquette) to a scandal-plagued Hollywood film set. The fourth film, released in 2011, was a riff on the mid-2000s horror remake trend.
With the sixth film commenting on the very idea of one-and-done films that evolve into franchises, one can only speculate on what this seventh film will be “about.” However, Barrera and “Wednesday” breakout Jenna Ortega will certainly be outwitting one or more knife-wielding Ghostfaces.
Bloody Disgusting first reported this news
