Why The Team Behind ‘Scream VI’ Ignored People’s Advice To Walk Away From The Sequel

The horror requel Scream was an undisputed hit when it hit theaters in January 2022. It was a critical success and revived a franchise that had been dormant for over a decade, grossing over $140 million against a $24 million budget.

Fourteen months later, Radio Silence, the creative team consisting of directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, and producer Chad Villella are back at the helm of the series with Scream VIsurprisingly against some people’s advice.

“I don’t think there was a single person in our lives who said, ‘Doing another one is a great idea,'” Bettinelli-Olpin explained. “He was like, ‘You did it. It worked, now back off,’ but the reality is we had so much fun doing it and we love the people we did it with that there was no way we were going to do it.” Let’s not do it again if we had this chance.”

“All emotions were running high. We were terrified, anxious, nervous and scared, but we knew that in the wake of the success of the last one, we could make some changes that maybe we couldn’t take together Scream. That’s what really got us excited.”

Gillett added that the previous film’s mission was to honor the franchise they loved as fans. Turning to the creator’s perspective changed their lives “in terrible and amazing ways,” but they couldn’t do it again.

“It had to be something else,” the director said. “We played this note, we played the greatest hits, and now we have to do something completely unexpected.”

“Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven, the guys who created it, challenged themselves with every movie, trying to keep it interesting and exciting for them as creators and for the fans. Fortunately, they’ve built a franchise that’s as good as the risks. takes, so we were given a lot of license from the previous films.”

Villella added, “Kevin giving his blessing and being on the first film with him set the table for it. He told us at one point, ‘I didn’t know if this was going to work or if this was ever going to happen again, but what you did with the first movie it made me want to see sequels and sequels and sequels to continue.”

The results have already started paying off at the box office, where Scream VI has already received $5.7 million in previews. It is projected to secure the series’ best opening weekend with an estimated $35 million to $40 million.

This latest installment of the franchise takes Ghostface’s spree from Woodsboro to New York. While this isn’t the first time an entry in the series has left behind its small-town origins, that hasn’t stopped some fans from taking issue with the decision. The filmmakers have a theory as to why this is.

“These movies are supposed to make you worry with these choices, but there’s something, and this was brought up in Scream, that there’s something about the way we all watch movies now where we want things to surprise us, as long as they surprise us. us the same way,” thought Bettinelli-Olpin. “It’s like, ‘If you surprise me in a way I don’t want to be surprised like that, then shame on you.’ We read it and were like, ‘This is crazy.'”

Gillett added: “We can put going to LA in Scream 3 in its own box for a second, but Windsor College from Scream 2 and Woodsboro exist in a little fantasyland. They are proxies for other small towns and universities, but New York is New York. It’s a real place, we know a lot about it, it’s on a ton of TV and movies, and it’s so influential.”

“The anxiety we had was just that we would have to ground the film and represent horror in a different way, and Ghostface would have to be a little bit different because now he’s in a familiar place. The intersection of these things is the scary thing about this movie. I think that was probably people’s anxiety, and we understand that because we had all that anxiety too. We just had to bring it differently.”

Although the main photo was taken in Montreal, Canada, dressed to look like New York, Scream VI The creative team wanted to embrace the spirit and certain iconic elements of Manhattan and the boroughs, including the subway.

The train is the location of one of the film’s most memorable sets. Includes a set of extras decked out in Halloween costumes, including masks depicting some of Hollywood’s most feared and respected titans of horror.

Getting a license for these images can take time, effort and a lot of money.

“This whole series has been a crazy puzzle,” Gillett confessed. “Every department tackled it from a different angle, and that’s the only reason we got it out. In particular, in terms of cleanups, we were kind of surprised by how easy it was to clean all those masks in the end.”

There were specific stipulations the team had to adhere to, such as Leatherface not being able to wield a chainsaw.

“They wouldn’t be able to do what made them the villain you know from the movies, but the masks were really freakishly easy to clean,” the co-director continued. “We also couldn’t use them in marketing materials. You can’t use these slasher movie icons to promote our slasher movie.”

“There was a minute there where we definitely thought this was a crazy question, and there was no way we could nail down what we needed to get rid of. The show is so dependent on the cast showing up on that subway and having these recognizable figures who were in the subway car. We found out they were fine in preparation. Someone said, ‘Hey, by the way, guys, the masks have been cleaned,’ and we said, ‘Excuse me, what?'”

They also wanted to make sure the legacy of the franchise’s boogeyman was present without being too obvious.

“We had so many conversations about it,” Bettinelli-Olpin recalls. “We wanted a Ghostface hero mask from the fifth Scream movie, three crappy ones, a homemade one from the tv show and so on. A lot of work went into keeping track of how many specific Ghostface masks there were going to be.”

The Radio Silence trio also confirmed that the subway scene in the subway is filled with Easter eggs for fans to discover.

“It’s a fun thing to do with the film VideodromeGillett concluded. “There’s a shot where one of the passengers is wearing a suit that looks like what Debbie Harry wore in the movie. It doesn’t just look like that, though. it is the actual suit. There’s a lot of really fun, very craft-specific stuff on this train that we’re so proud of.”