The Scream franchise is about to be resurrected, as a fifth movie is on the cusp of starting production. Scream 5 will be the first film in the horror franchise in ten years, following 2011’s Scream 4 – which itself arrived 11 years after 2000’s Scream 3 concluded the original trilogy. Despite those gaps, one of the great things about the series is its pretty consistent quality, but obviously fans have their favorites and least favorites.
In a new interview, longtime star David Arquette has revealed which of the films ranks at the bottom on his list and it probably won’t come as a surprise. Arquette named Scream 3 the worst of the bunch while speaking with NY Daily News, pointing to the behind the scenes troubles as a reason it ended up being “all over the place.”
“We had to throw the script out at the beginning,” Arquette said. “They were rewriting the whole time. We’d get pages like on the day of shooting. It was just kind of all over the place. It’s interesting and it’s funny but it’s a different tone from the rest.”
Scream 3 took things in a very meta direction as the cast of the film-within-a-film Stab 3 get hunted down by Ghostface, meaning our heroes Sidney, Dewey and Gale have to survive alongside the actors playing them. The constant rewriting of the script during production is well-known, with the entire ending being reworked in reshoots. It has its supporters, sure, but the threequel is undeniably less-polished than the rest.
Arquette also came clean about his favorite of the four, with his choice again likely matching that of many fans. Yes, he went with the original Scream, citing how much of a thrill it was to make.
“My favorite [of the films] is ‘Scream 1,’ just because that’s where it all started and it was such a surprise how the audience loved it so much,” Arquette explained. “And getting to work with Wes [Craven] for the first time was a real dream come true.”
The vast majority would also rank Scream at the top and Scream 3 at the bottom, but there’s probably more of a debate about which out of Scream 2 and 4 is better. Where Scream 5 will fall, of course, is the big question we have now. If Neve Campbell signs up alongside Arquette and Courteney Cox, it might stand a chance of being favorably reviewed by fans, but we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.
