Scream 5 Co-Director Explains Why The Movie Is A Sequel And Not A Reboot

The fifth installment in the legendary slasher franchise has already wrapped filming a full thirteen months ahead of the movie’s theatrical release, and has even settled on an official title. However, fans were a little divided following the news that Ready or Not directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett had decided to call their new entry… Scream.

While that could cause confusion in the long run seeing as Wes Craven’s classic 1996 flick has the very same name, some people were quick to point out that it actually fits the Scream remit. The movies have all been pretty self-aware and packed with references to the wider canon of horror pics, and the trend of using the same title as the original for a new entry in the series has been done before by the likes of Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street and more.

In a recent interview, Gillett explained why they wanted to make a direct sequel instead of a reboot, and from the sound of things, the decision was largely based on both their appreciation of Craven’s first four films and how Scream has always incorporated elements of pop culture into the narrative for an extra layer of meta awareness.

“I think for us we had this fear, and Matt alluded to this earlier, going into reading the script. There’s just so much weight in what those four movies are. This by the way speaks to the legacy characters. The fact that there are so many characters that so many people want to know more about, want to have more story told with these characters. There’s just a level of love and respect for the world that Wes and Kevin Williamson created. So for us it felt like the only way to do this right was to create connectivity. And a lot of it is also just what the Scream movies are, right? They’re about lineage. They’re about the evolution of pop culture and the evolution of the genre. And you can’t have something new without also giving a nod to what came before it. And paying respect, and giving a bow to what followed.”

Of course, it also helps that the nostalgia business is booming and almost every brand with any sort of cultural cache or name recognition has been resurrected at this point, and given the directorial duo’s track record of putting fresh spins on familiar tropes, it’ll be interesting to see how they tackle the fifth entry in a franchise that’ll be over a quarter of a century old by the time Scream arrives in January 2022.