‘Scream VI’ director explain how the story changed once Neve Campbell dropped out

Neve Campbell shocked Scream fans everywhere after announcing last June that she wasn’t returning to the sixth film following a financial dispute with the studio. 

For context, the actress, who portrayed the role of Sidney Prescott in five of the six installments of Scream, revealed in a statement that the reason why she chose to walk away was because she felt the offer that she was given didn’t compare to the value she’s brought to the franchise. Although the production crew remained silent regarding the situation at the time, Campbell received support from her Scream co-stars. 

Fast forward to nearly a year later, Scream directors Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, producer Chad Villella, and writers James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick opened up about the slight complications they faced when creating Scream VI following Campbell’s departure. During an interview with Collider, Bettinelli-Olpin disclosed that Campbell left the film pre-production. Because it happened so early, the crew was able to come up with various drafts. He said, 

“We found out early on in pre-production that Neve wasn’t gonna do this one and there had been drafts and ideas and stuff going around, but the thing that Guy and Jamie did that was so great and really helped us is that they had created the structure of the movie that I don’t think ever really changed much. Stuff like the motives, that shifted, but the movie from kind of a bird’s eye view didn’t change that much.”

Later in the conversation, Bettinelli-Olpin shared that despite everyone being “bummed” after finding out that Campbell wasn’t going to reprise her role as Sidney Prescott, the crew made it their mission to highlight the qualities of the newer characters so that moviegoers could get to know them a little bit better and possibly love them as much as they loved the older cast members. He explained, while talking about legacy characters Sidney Prescott, Dewey Riley (David Arquette), and Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox),

“Obviously we were super bummed when Neve wasn’t going to do it, and the thing that we immediately went to was like, ‘Okay, if we’re not doing this with Neve again, we have to make sure that you fall in love with these characters the way that we all fell in love with Sidney and Gale and Dewey.’ So we took that responsibility really, really seriously and made sure that if we do our job right, you leave this movie going, ‘Oh, I love the Core Four and I want their journey to continue the same way that we all want Sidney and Gale and Dewey to continue.’”

Scream VI is now playing in theaters.