Scream 7 opened on February 27, 2026 without Jenna Ortega, without Melissa Barrera, without the directors who made the previous two films, and without the story those films were building toward. It made $64 million in its opening weekend — a franchise record — and was met with reviews that ranged from middling to genuinely frustrated. And the more the behind-the-scenes story has come into focus, the more the reaction to the film has been shaped by what it was supposed to be as much as what it actually is.
What it was supposed to be: a bleak, contained, psychologically dark third chapter in which Tara Carpenter died early, her death shattered what remained of Sam Carpenter’s resistance to her own Billy Loomis-like impulses, and Sam became Ghostface. A three-film arc concluding with the franchise’s most daring twist. Instead, the film stars Neve Campbell as Sidney Prescott, living quietly in Indiana with a husband and three kids, pulled back into Ghostface chaos for the fifth time.
Both versions of this film have their appeal. Only one of them will never exist.
Movie.Takes (@Takes2Movie) took to X to share, “Acting star Jenna Ortega who plays (Tara Carpenter) in ‘SCREAM 5’ and ‘SCREAM VI’, reports show that her character would have been killed off early into the film, or opening scene of ‘SCREAM 7’.
• Original plan was to be a trilogy where Tara’s death would crush the hold that kept Sam from acting on sinister, “Billy Loomis-like” impulses, from the previous two films. 🔪🩸”
Acting star Jenna Ortega who plays (Tara Carpenter) in ‘SCREAM 5’ and ‘SCREAM VI’, reports show that her character would have been killed off early into the film, or opening scene of ‘SCREAM 7’.
• Original plan was to be a trilogy where Tara’s death would crush the hold that… pic.twitter.com/lm0B5T8sVY
— Movie.Takes (@Takes2Movie) March 3, 2026
The Departures, Explained Properly
Credit: ‘Scream 7’: Courteney Cox Reunites With ‘Friends’ Co-Star for Slasher Sequel
Melissa Barrera was fired from Scream 7 in November 2023 after social media posts about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Spyglass Media issued a statement drawing a line at “antisemitism or the incitement of hate in any form.” Barrera responded: “First and foremost I condemn Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia,” and added, “Silence is not an option for me.”
Jenna Ortega’s departure followed and was initially attributed to scheduling conflicts with Wednesday. In April 2025, she told The Cut something more specific: “It had nothing to do with pay or scheduling. The Melissa stuff was happening, and it was all kind of falling apart. If Scream VII wasn’t going to be with that team of directors and those people I fell in love with, then it didn’t seem like the right move for me in my career at the time.”
That team of directors — Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin — had also exited. Christopher Landon, of Happy Death Day fame, was brought in to replace them and then also left in December 2023 after receiving death threats from fans who mistakenly believed he had been involved in Barrera’s firing. He spoke about it in Vanity Fair in April 2025. The production that eventually reached theaters was assembled from scratch under entirely new creative leadership.
The Original Plan: Sam as Ghostface, Tara as the Catalyst
Skeet Ulrich, who played Billy Loomis and appeared in de-aged flashback sequences in both Scream (2022) and Scream VI, confirmed the franchise’s original three-film vision in a December 2025 interview with Entertainment Weekly. “When we talked about coming back for 5, it was a three-picture arc for Billy Loomis to slowly turn his daughter into the killer,” he said. “Obviously, those things didn’t pan out.”
The de-aged Billy sequences that struck some critics as tonally odd suddenly read as architectural rather than indulgent. They were not nostalgia. They were setup for a reveal that never came.
Gillett and Bettinelli-Olpin added texture to their vision in a February 2026 EW interview. Bettinelli-Olpin said the tone would have been “going to f— you up.” Gillett described something “ultra-contained, almost continuous, like minute-to-minute.” Given their work on Abigail — a single-location horror film that unfolds in near-real time — the template is easy to imagine. Sam and a co-conspirator, or Sam alone, trapping Sidney and Gale somewhere. A confrontation structured as a pressure cooker rather than a globe-trotting chase.
As for Tara: a report from Cinemablend citing the YouTube channel Beyond the Mask indicates she would have died early in the film, possibly in the opening sequence. That would make her death the emotional breaking point for Sam — the loss of the one person she had spent two films trying to protect. It would have recontextualized everything that came before, and Tara surviving would not have been part of the calculation.
What Jenna Ortega Has Been Doing Instead
Ortega has not been waiting around. Wednesday on Netflix established her as a legitimate star beyond the horror genre, and the show’s second season has been a consistent anchor of her schedule. Her performance as Astrid in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024) added Tim Burton collaboration to her resume and helped demonstrate range that the Scream franchise, for all its merits, was not fully utilizing. She has continued to develop projects that position her in dark, character-driven genre territory, and her candid comments about the Scream 7 situation have made her one of the more interesting interview subjects in Hollywood over the past year.
The Film That Exists and What It Means for the Franchise
The Scream 7 that opened on February 27 centers Campbell’s Sidney Prescott in a genuinely different emotional register than the Carpenter sister films — quieter, more domestic, building to horror from a place of apparent safety. Joel McHale plays her husband Mark Evans, and Isabel May plays their teenage daughter Tatum. Campbell sells the return with real conviction and the film has a clear emotional thesis. Goldman’s “reheated horror-movie comfort food” description from MovieWeb is not wrong, but it is also not entirely fair to a film that was assembled under extraordinary circumstances.
What the $64 million opening weekend confirms is that Scream as a franchise has survived the chaos. What the critical reception confirms is that surviving and thriving are different things. The question now is whether Paramount treats the opening weekend as validation for the direction taken or as a foundation to rebuild the creative ambition the franchise was primed for before everything fell apart.
If you have not seen Scream 7 yet and you are a fan of the franchise, go — it is worth forming your own opinion rather than arriving through reviews alone. And if you have already seen it, reading Skeet Ulrich’s EW interview and Ortega’s The Cut piece back to back will give you a richer appreciation of both what you watched and what you did not get to see. The gap between those two things is genuinely fascinating.
