Jonah Naplan   March 5, 2026

The road to the release of “Scream 7” has been an impossibly rocky one. Years of development hell and controversy about the directors and franchise stars made it seem increasingly unlikely that the movie would ever come out in one piece, let alone be good. Lo and behold, it isn’t. After a solid fifth and sixth movie that were never even supposed to happen (both “Scream 4” and “Scream 3” before it seemed to be the last ones), this seventh movie aims to fix a 30-year-old franchise that appeared to crumble beyond repair after previous star and Sidney Prescott successor Melissa Barrera was fired, costar Jenna Ortega walked out, and director duo Radio Silence decided their efforts would best be spent somewhere else. Out of desperation, the producers ushered back in the invaluable Kevin Williamson, who wrote the original “Scream,” and sort of conceived this idea of a satirical slasher movie back in 1996. Working with co-writer Guy Busick, he resides in the director’s chair for the first time in the franchise with “Scream 7,” and the result feels more like a corporate-designed product than a real movie, carefully calibrated to touch on all the “greatest hits,” and pander to the fans as much as possible. It ends up far and away the worst of the series yet.

“Scream 7” opens with perhaps the most tongue-and-cheek cold open of the entire franchise, and it’s actually a main highlight of the movie. Frat bro Scott (Jimmy Tatro) brings his unassuming girlfriend Madison (Michelle Randolph) to the infamous Macher house, where key scenes from the “Stab” movies—the slasher series within this slasher series—took place. This twisty tourist attraction includes a lifesize Ghostface statue complete with motion sensors, and it’s played up so well that you could easily mistake the robot as the real one. The moments where Scott and Madison are making small talk in the kitchen while the fake Ghostface looms in the background are truly suspenseful stuff, and Williamson does an excellent job of ratcheting up the tension before the real Ghostface emerges from the shadows, slaughters the couple, and burns the house down. After the words “Scream 7” flash onto the screen, though, everything starts to go downhill.

Turns out this jarring opening has nothing to do with the rest of the story, which relies heavily on coincidence and the audience’s suspension of disbelief to move things along from point A to point B. After sitting out on the action of “Scream VI” in New York, Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) returns as the main character, now living in a small town called Pine Grove with her husband Mark (Joel McHale) and teenage daughter Tatum (Isabel May). Her quiet existence is again disrupted when she opts to pick up the phone once more; there’s a new Ghostface in town and he might be the apparently undead Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) or just somebody impersonating him through AI deepfake and video editing. This desperation to bring back actors once thought to have been through with the franchise decades ago only heightens the feeling that “Scream 7” is solely built around nostalgia-farming. And you better believe Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) ends up returning, too. And of course she makes a badass entrance in a moment of peril. And of course there’s a noticeable pause so that the audience can erupt into applause. I’d be surprised if there is any.

Throughout “Scream 7,” you can just feel in the air that something is off, like none of this was ever supposed to happen. The endless script rewrites and story reworkings are felt in all the bizarre dialogue exchanges which awkwardly try to explain the narrative jump from the last movie to this one. Characters interact with one another without the charisma that they usually do. Everyone seems tired. No one really wants to be here. The exhaustion is equally apparent in the stabby setpieces which lack the propulsion this franchise usually excels at. The filmmakers try to make up for the lackluster thrills by upping the gore factor, which is more relentless here than in any other “Scream” movie, but it’s more clear than ever that it’s only being used for shock value, distracting viewers from dissecting the plot and logic too deeply.

A tavern meet-up that turns into a slaughterhouse would be a stand-out sequence of nauseating carnage in any other movie, but in this one it’s clearly just disguising how thin everything else is with cheap blood and guts. It lacks intrigue. It lacks nerve. Watching Ghostface stalk Tatum through the town at night, hurtling around corners, and hiding behind lampposts, just doesn’t have the same rhythm or fun energy these movies usually capitalize on. And Tatum, with all props given to May, just isn’t the same final girl that Sidney Prescott was in her prime, no matter how hard the screenplay is pushing for it.

The recent franchise entries have always had a problem with overcrowding, but “Scream 7” particularly struggles. When the twins from the last two movies, Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Chad (Mason Gooding), show up again, even diehard fans may have forgotten who they are and what role they might have played previously. Lots of characters end up just standing around and taking up space, including Cox, who, despite the constant focus on Campbell, gets almost nothing to do here, besides delivering her signature looks of disdain because, well, it’s a “Scream” movie. And yet, even with a lot of the original crew, this barely feels like a “Scream” movie at all.

When the masks come off in the third act, we’re left with the most inept Ghostface reveal to date, backed by motives that make no sense, and compelling us to wonder why we ever cared who the killer was in the first place. Of course, the movie ends on a note that telegraphs its legacyquel sensibilities even further, blithely attempting to pass the torch off to Tatum, but at this point does it really matter where the franchise heads next? After this one, I’d be hesitant to answer the phone again.

Now playing in theaters.