Neve Campbell Won’t Return for Scream 6
The hardest thing for a franchise to do is to let go of the past—after all, the past is practically the definition of a film franchise model. In the case of Wes Craven’s Scream, that means a constant focus on ultimate final girl Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), even in a film like 2022’s Scream reboot, where she played a tertiary role. We actually quite liked that movie, and its efforts to establish a new generation of primary players to drive the Scream franchise forward—in fact, we wrote afterward that the best decision for Scream 6 to make would be to leave its legacy characters behind entirely, most notably Sidney and Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), in order to finally let the new characters take on the burden of being true protagonists.
Now it seems that this is pretty much what is happening, albeit not quite in the way we would have desired. Deadline is reporting that Campbell says she will not be appearing in 2023’s upcoming Scream sequel, although it’s not because the script was written without her—it’s because they simply wouldn’t offer her enough money to make it worth her while. Suffice to say, this is pretty much what no one wants to hear, suggesting that the original Scream 6 script calls for Sidney’s presence, but that they now have to rewrite it to remove her. Effectively, one might call this “the worst of both worlds.”