Final ‘Scream’ Trailer Highlights Strong Social Media Buzz

This 70-second teaser is mostly an excuse to hype the already solid online buzz from junket press who saw the film last week (reviews will begin dropping tonight at midnight). The sequel, part five in the 25-year-old franchise, arrives in theaters January 14, 2022 (along with Thursday previews) over MLK weekend. It only exists because Spyglass which bought the rights to make new Scream movies and convinced Paramount to distribute. That’s why a lot of these reboots, remakes and continuations of seemingly dead franchises happen. When the properties change hands, the new owners want to get some bang for their buck.

The film opens 11 years after Scream 4 which opened 11 years after Scream 3, making Scream the Before Sunrise of slasher franchises. Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson’s Scream opened with just $6.2 million in late December 1996. It rode a wave of good reviews and white-hot “the kids say it rocks” buzz to become the first teen slasher movie to top $100 million domestic. At the time, the biggest grossing teen-targeted/non-prestige horror (so not counting The Exorcist or The Silence of the Lambs) was the 1989 adaptation of Pet Semetary which earned $57 million domestic. Yes, 17x your opening weekend is a miracle even during the holiday season.

Scream 2 opened in mid-December, less than a year later, pulling a true breakout sequel performance with a $33 million opening weekend, second only to Air Force One ($37 million) among R-rated openings at the time. I saw Scream on its first Saturday in a near-empty theater. I saw Scream 2 in a packed-to-the-gills and energetic-as-hell opening night showing. When Dewey was rolled into the ambulance, having again survived being stabbed in the back, the audience roared with approval and relief. It wasn’t super leggy (Titanic, Tomorrow Never Dies, As Good As It Gets, Jackie Brown and Good Will Hunting all opening over the next two weeks didn’t help), but it still earned $101 million domestic and $171 million worldwide on a $24 million budget.

Cut to February 2000, when Scream 3 had to deal with a post-Columbine culture that saw fit to blame scary movies, video games and heavy metal music for young men killing their peers with heavy weaponry, because that remains politically easier than blaming access to guns. The film went to another high school melodrama to a sequel set on the set of a Stab movie, where A) none of the victims were terribly sympathetic, B) the violence was so tame it could have been aired unedited on network television and C) the film undercut the whole franchise with a “Sidney’s secret brother is the puppet master” twist so awful and self-defeating, Hollywood saw fit to keep using it for Austin Powers 3, Spectre and The Rise of Skywalker.

Scream 3 opened with $34 million and flat lined with $89 million domestic and $162 million on a $40 million budget. That was fine, but the bloom was off the rose, and that should have been the end of it. Despite being, or because it was, a legacy before they were cool, Scream 4 earned just $38 million domestic and $98 million worldwide on a $40 million budget. As I noted many times at the time, legacy sequels and generational nostalgia are hard sells when you can’t bring the kids and need to pay for a babysitter. But now, because Hollywood is stuck in a trap where nobody wants to see anything new, we’ve got Scream 5 nor stupidly titled just Scream.

Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox and David Arquette join newbies Melissa Barrera, Jenna Ortega, Jack Quaid, Jasmin Savoy Brown and Kyle Gallner, with Barrera (In the Heights) as the new protagonist and Ortega apparently being the curtain raiser-kill. This is another example of “not a white guy” actors being used as a glorified alibi for resurrecting a dead IP, and I can only hope that its potential failure does no more damage to its non-white leads than did Scream 4 did to Emma Roberts. I’ve long argued that inclusivity is an added value element for a film audiences already want to see, which only works if audiences want to see another Scream movie.

While obviously a lot cheaper than The Matrix Resurrections, Scream faces a similar challenge in terms of banking on nostalgia for a franchise for which audiences generally only adore the first film. Yes, plenty of folks correctly love the Matrix sequels and Scream 2. But the last two Scream films were met with poor reviews and generally poor word of mouth, even if the generation that saw Scream 4 when they were teenagers are now  convinced that it was “good, actually.” I’m curious if modern consensus among the “youths” about the previous Scream legacy sequel will drive any additional interest in this one. Or, maybe general audiences don’t care about Scream 5 anymore than they cared about Scream 4.

Will the series finally have the guts to bump off at least one member of its star trio (a constant dilemma since this is the rare horror franchise headlined by marquee character heroes)? Will this installment be the first good one since Scream 2 in 1997? Will this be another case of an IP extension that exists not because the fans want it but because the studio does? Will audiences who would otherwise me primed for a new Scream movie decide to ignore it and rewatch Fear Street 1994 or SyFy’s generally clever Chucky television show instead? We’ll find out on January 14, 2022, when Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s Scream opens theatrically.